The mission given to election workers on the ground in the Indian state of Bihar this summer was daunting: Verify the identity of nearly 80 million eligible voters in only a few weeks.
Their work was complicated by a number of circumstances. It was harvest time and there was heavy flooding. Millions of people in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, were on the move in search of work. There was confusion over the orders from the country's election commission, and the election workers faced enormous pressure as the exercise became the subject of legal and political battles.
Despite the problems, the commission released on schedule a draft voter list, which cut off 6.5 million people in the state. It said that about a third of those were dead and that the rest had moved elsewhere or had their names duplicated.
But some people removed for being dead turned out to be very much alive. They were paraded in the capital, New Delhi, by India's opposition, which used them as evidence to suggest that the verification exercise was part of a ploy by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to influence elections.
"I have heard you are not alive?" Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress, joked with half a dozen of the voters listed as deceased.
Mr. Gandhi and other opposition leaders have latched onto the rushed exercise to raise deep concerns about the integrity of voting in India, something which has long been widely accepted even as democratic freedoms have been shrinking.
Bihar, a state of 130 million people, elected over two dozen members of Mr. Modi's coalition to Parliament last year, helping the prime minister secure his third term in office in a closely fought national election. In the coming weeks, a state election will decide who governs Bihar itself.
Opposition leaders say that revising the voter list so drastically and so suddenly means one of the two elections cannot be trusted. Either the last election was based on a questionable voter list, or the ruling party is trying to engineer the results of the upcoming state election by removing some voters.
They are accusing Mr. Modi's party -- which lost its majority in India's national elections last year, but remained in power as head of a coalition -- of trying to disenfranchise Muslims and other groups who they fear will not support them in the state election.
The process has put such a burden on existing voters to verify themselves that experts have compared it with the American South in the early 1900s, when Black people were deprived of the right to vote through literacy tests and cumbersome document requirements.
The dispute has reached India's Supreme Court, and is at the heart of an intense political mudslinging.
The result is a protracted mess. Election workers, voters and experts interviewed by The New York Times suggested that the process had not been completed according to the guidelines laid out by the voting body, dimming hopes of a more reliable voter list. Many are questioning how the commission missed the deaths of 2.2 million people during its routine revisions of the rolls, including one only a few months ago.
Election officials have acknowledged millions of complaints raised by the opposition about the process and sharp criticism from previous election chiefs, but have said the process is going ahead and will reach completion soon.
Mr. Modi's party has dismissed the opposition's claims as an attempt by sore losers to undermine India's democracy, which is the largest in the world. It has framed the voter verification exercise as the start of a nationwide campaign to weed out "infiltrators," a term that ostensibly refers to Bangladeshi migrants but is often stretched by the supporters of Mr. Modi's party to discriminate against Muslims.
In a news conference to rebut the opposition's claims, Anurag Thakur, a leader of the party, only furthered concerns around voting irregularities. He claimed that there had been a "bulk addition" of voters in the state of West Bengal, one of India's few states run by an opposition party, and that there had been tens of thousands of dubious and duplicate voters in regions that opposition leaders had won.
"They want to save their vote bank of infiltrators," Mr. Thakur said.
Mr. Gandhi has said that his alliance partners have been dumbfounded by the results in several elections where they lost despite being neck and neck in opinion polls. They have started gathering evidence that they say shows mass irregularities in recent elections in Maharashtra and Karnataka. They have been piecing together evidence on their own because the election commission has refused to share with them data such as machine-readable lists of voters or CCTV footage of polling booths to match the number of people physically voting with the number of votes recorded.
Gyanesh Kumar, the chief election commissioner, lashed out at the opposition, demanding that it make its accusations under oath or apologize. He made no mention of Mr. Thakur's similar accusations of election irregularities.
"Should the election commission share CCTV videos of anyone's mother, sister, daughter-in-law?" he said.
At the heart of the chaos in Bihar is the matter of which documents count as identification.
The election commission asked all of the state's voters to prove their right to vote by filling out a form and submitting one of 11 listed documents. But the list excluded the most-commonly used identification documents, including the voter ID issued by the election commission itself and what is called the Aadhaar card, which over the past decade the Modi government has made central to everything from opening a bank accounts to getting a phone.
Even more confusing: Aadhaar is the basis on which many of the 11 approved documents are issued.
"For everything you said, Aadhaar is needed; you had people line up to get Aadhaar," said Dharmendra Kumar, executive director of Dalit Vikas Abhiyan Samiti, a civil society group in Bihar. "Why not use it for this now?"
While India's Supreme Court asked the election commission to add Aadhaar as valid proof of identity, commission repeatedly dragged its feet, agreeing to comply only when process of submitting documents was largely over.
But on ground in Bihar, many local election workers—who spoke anonymously as they were under strict orders from commission not to talk to media—said they had no choice but to accept Aadhaar as proof of identity from very early in process. It became clear right away that a large number of people did not have any of listed documents, they said.
Faced with threats of suspension or having their pay cut if they failed to complete the exercise, some election workers resorted to guess work, including creating a family tree and using a photograph of it as a proof of ID, presuming that people were eligible to vote if their fathers or mothers appeared in a previous voter list.
Critics say there was utter confusion for voters and lack of transparency on part of officials denting hopes of exercise resulting in cleaner voter roll. The election commission said 98 percent of 72 million voters participating in exercise had submitted their documents by end of August. Commission officials, however, did not respond to emailed questions on data regarding what identification documents were received as part of verification.
Tejashwi Yadav, leader of opposition in Bihar, said its estimates based on revised draft list showed that in each assembly seat about 25,000 to 30,000 names had been deleted. Independent assessments have shown that average deletion exceeds winning margin from last election in two-thirds of state’s seats.
"The margin was, you can imagine, very low," Mr. Yadav said.
The Supreme Court has asked the commission to continue addressing grievances, and the hearings process will continue. But filing complaints ahead of the state vote, which is expected in November, is not easy for many people who travel for work or who have poor digital literacy or internet access.
Sanjay Kumar, a professor at Patna university, said his wife's name had been dropped from the rolls without explanation. He said he was in touch with an election worker and was hopeful he could fix it. But he worried about others.
"Only the privileged class will be able to get the mistakes fixed," he said.