"13 crore names" is the number every TV debate on the Election Commission's SIR now starts from. You get media to repeat that number ten times and it becomes the fact. Almost nobody has asked what is inside it... @TheJaggi breaks it down. What the 13 crore actually contains: - 2.8 crore listed as dead - 6.3 crore flagged as possible permanent migrants - 1 crore duplicate registrations - ~3 crore simply absent from home when enumerators called - Every one of these can be restored on appeal (except the dead..) These numbers - the scale of them - is UNREMARKABLE at India's scale: - Up to 1 crore Indians die every year - The last SIR was 2002-04 - at least 10-12 crore voters have died since - and most never came off the rolls (nobody files a deletion for the dead) How about migrants? - India's internal migrant population is around 45 crore - 6.3 crore flagged as migrated is a fraction of that - Wrongful deletions are probably under 50 lakh nationally - half of one percent of a roll approaching 100 crore The two mind traps doing the work: FIRST - Anchoring: the first big number sticks. - Vinod Rai's Rs 1.76 lakh crore "presumptive loss" on 2008 telecom licences came with three lower estimates -only the biggest survived SECOND - Loss aversion: a voter who fears deletion shouts louder than the 99% who were never touched - Result: "millions and millions" disenfranchised (Justice Ujjal Bhuyan at Nalsar) and "90 lakh knocked out in Bengal to help the BJP" (Rohinton Nariman) - neither claim came with a denominator It's not like EC is all OK, they've also goofed up but not that badly: - It never stress-tested its process for a country where every gross number is huge - A once-in-two-decades purge was always going to throw up figures this size - roll-cleaning has to be continuous - The appeals route for wrongful exclusion has to be stronger than it is now (Link below)