In West Bengal, the appellate tribunal that was supposed to act as a safeguard for wrongly excluded voters has instead come to symbolise the hollowness of the entire adjudication process following the Election Commission’s special intensive revision (SIR) of rolls. The single most shocking figure is this. Out of over 14 lakh people found ineligible to vote in the first phase, only 136 were reportedly cleared by the appellate tribunal ahead of the April 23 polling date. This means relief reached barely 0.01% of those affected.That number alone is enough to expose the absurdity of the system, but what makes the situation even more alarming is the tribunal’s reported success rate. The tribunal examined 138 appeals and cleared 136 people to vote. In other words, nearly 98% of those who managed to reach the tribunal got relief.This raises a devastating question. If almost everyone who reached the appellate stage was found deserving of restoration, then how reliable were the original decisions that declared people ineligible in the first place?On the one hand, lakhs of people were found ineligible and placed under adjudication by judicial officers. On the other, almost every case that actually reached the appellate tribunal appears to have been reversed in favour of the voter.These two facts cannot comfortably coexist unless one accepts that the original adjudication process was deeply flawed, arbitrarily applied, or so inaccessible that only a tiny handful of affected people could challenge it at all.This is why the figure of 0.01% must remain at the centre of any assessment of the tribunal’s functioning. The issue is not merely that 136 people got relief but also that 14,28,633 others in Phase 1 did not. A tribunal cannot claim legitimacy simply because it corrected a few cases. It must be judged by whether it provided real access to justice at scale. By that standard, it has failed.Nowhere is this failure more glaring than in Murshidabad, the district that suffered the heaviest blow.To follow what is being said below, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.Constituency-wise figures show that Murshidabad recorded the highest number of “found not eligible” cases in the state at 4,55,137. Yet among all those exclusions, only 29 people from the entire district were reportedly cleared by the tribunal. That works out to roughly 0.006% relief in the district worst hit by deletions. Even this is lower than the already scandalous statewide pattern.The story becomes even more outrageous when one looks at individual constituencies. In Bhagabangola assembly constituency, 47,493 people were found not eligible. Yet only one person from Bhagabangola was reportedly cleared by the tribunal. That is relief for barely 0.002% of those excluded there. In Samserganj, where 74,775 people were found not eligible, again only one person was reportedly cleared. That is about 0.001% relief. These are not just low numbers. They are figures so vanishingly small that they make the very idea of appellate justice look meaningless.Also read: What the Patterns of Exclusion for Muslim, Scheduled Caste and Urban Voters SayWhen the process excludes people in the tens of thousands, but restores them one by one, the appellate mechanism ceases to be a genuine corrective.The right to vote is not a bureaucratic favour. It is the most basic political right in a constitutional democracy. Any process that removes lakhs of people from the electorate must be held to the highest standards of fairness, transparency, and accessibility. A system in which relief reaches only 0.01% of the affected population does not meet that standard.The real test of justice is not whether a tribunal can reverse a handful of cases. The real test is whether it can protect ordinary citizens from wrongful exclusion in the first place, and whether it can offer meaningful redress to all those affected. West Bengal’s appellate tribunal, judged by these numbers, appears not to have delivered justice, but to have exposed the hollowness of the process that produced these exclusions in the first place.