Officials of various organisations working on election monitoring feared that anomalies had taken place in making the updated as well as fresh voter lists.

"Inclusion of fake voters and exclusion of eligible ones have occurred rampantly both in the fresh and updated lists particularly in the urban areas like the capital city, said Badiul Alam Majumdar, secretary of Shujan, an NGO working on issues of good governance.

"This is why there is no alternative to thorough correction of the voter list in the major city areas," said Majumdar, also global vice president of The Hunger Project.

"Above all, the common men have no trust in the updated list, as it is full of flaws. That is the fact that calls for thorough corrections of the entire list," Majumdar added.

One-third of the six percent 'excess voters' in the country are from Dhaka Division, said a survey report by Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) for International Affairs.

Najia Khogyani Hashemee, project manager of NDI, said, "We are not saying that the voters are fake but there are names in the list which should not have been there. There are names which should have been there."

Dhaka had about 29 lakh voters in the existing list. The fresh voter list contains 37 lakh voters while the updated list 45.35 lakh.

As per the controversial updated list in the capital the percentage of rise in the number of voters is astounding. In Cantonment area the number rose by 77.83 percent, in Motijheel by 74.26 percent, in Pallabi by 73.96 percent, in Dhanmondi by 72.66 percent, in Mirpur by 71.92 percent, and in Uttara by 68.96 percent. The Kotwali area, however, witnessed only 28.52 per cent rise while other areas witnessed between 45 and 61 percent rise.

The updated voter list showed at least 1.28 crore unaccounted voters or ghost voters on the basis of the 2001 census report of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) that shows 8.02 crore eligible people to be registered as voters.

Allegations of disenfranchisement and fictitious names are prompting speculations of huge number of fake voters. This voters' list was prepared in a hurry in the fag end of immediate past government.

In order to make an assessment of the accuracy of the updated voter list presented on September 7, Fair Election Monitoring Association (Fema) carried out a survey of voter sampling in six constituencies of six divisional cities.

The Fema surveyed 690 dwelling houses of the Dhaka-10 constituency.

The monitors found that 241 out of 690 houses had not been visited by the enumerators of the Election Commission for collection of claims or inclusion of name, objections or deletion of names and applications or corrections.

A survey conducted by Shujan in Block G-10 of Ward-7 in Mirpur revealed that the number of voters leaped to 2,698 in the fresh list from 2,052 in 2001 count.

But a total of 136 voters in the fresh list were non-existent in reality while 521 eligible voters in the locality were not enlisted. The eligible voters out of the list constitute 20.33 percent of the total voters in the locality.

If the 136 disputed voters are excluded from the number 2,698, actual number stands at 2,562, which shows a 24.85 percent increase in the number of voters.

According to the Electoral Roll Ordinance of 1982, the Election Commission is supposed only to revise the existing voter list to make it up to date before any parliamentary elections, said Majumdar.

Failure to send enumerators from door to door and publish draft voter list amount to violation of the article 11.1 of the Electoral Roll Ordinance.

Senior Assistant Secretary (Election) of the Election Commission Forhad Ahmed Khan said that correction is a continuous process. Anybody can come for addition or deletion in the list.

"Some lapses might have occurred in the process of updating, which is acceptable to some extent," he said.

Anybody can have a look at the updated list with the Thana Registration Officers, District Election Officers and Union Parishads.