First ‘Dog Babu’ wanted a residency certificate in Bihar to be a voter; soon he was joined by ‘Dogesh Kumar’ and ‘Cat Kumari’.Now, in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, a voter has become ‘Ram ne Yadav ko maara’.There are more such bizarre-sounding names appearing in voter lists – ‘Takkar Marna’, a ‘Murkh Devi’, one ‘Ram ne Sharma ko maara’ and ‘Mohammad Iqbal bheekh maangte hain’ to name a few.Some of these have been pranks and others, mistakes arising from AI-related confusion between translation and transliteration, but people are having a gala time on social media, whatever be the reason.A meme doing the rounds currently shows one person introducing himself, “Myself poor servant.” The other person exclaims, “Poor servant?” The first person clarifies, “I mean Garib Das.”The latest episode involves a resident from Uttar Pradesh named ‘Ramhit Yadav’ finding his name on his voter slip written in Hindi as ‘Ram ne Yadav ko maara’ (Ram hit Yadav).Another person named ‘Ramhit Sharma’ became ‘Ram ne Sharma ko maara’, while one ‘Ram’ became ‘Takkar Marna’ as the translation computer took the word ‘ram’ as the English verb that means to clash or collide.Social media has since become a landmine for such goof-ups, including one making ‘Mohammed Iqbal Beg’ into ‘Mohammed Iqbal bheekh mangte hain’.Also, one Phool Devi has been made into ‘Murkh Devi’.Not long ago, when the SIR (special intensive revision) of electoral rolls first started in Bihar and it was made a must for people to prove their Indian residency, people rushed to get residency certificates.Several pranksters also entered the game, some apparently to expose the system.One person got a residency certificate as ‘Dog Babu’, with father’s name shown as ‘Kutta Babu’ and mother’s as ‘Kutiya Devi’. The person even had a picture of a dog on the certificate.Another was registered as ‘Dogesh Kumar’ and one more as ‘Cat Kumari’.The trend has not been exclusive to India. Way back during the 2008 presidential election in the US, someone filed a voter registration application under the name ‘Mickey Mouse’. The application somehow got rejected, but it became a major talking point about voter registration fraud.Back in India, an entire neighbourhood in Pune was recently found to have voters aged 126 years.In Uttar Pradesh again a few years ago, a voter had a picture of actress Jattvibeny Leone on her election identity card. Across states, quite often names like ‘Donald Trump’, ‘Apple’, ‘Baahubali’, ‘Dosa’ and ‘Idli’ have found their way to the voter lists.After the Haryana assembly elections of 2024, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleged that a Brazilian model’s picture appeared at as many as 22 places across 10 different polling stations.And then there are always allegations and counter-allegations of dead people being present on voter rolls and names of living people getting deleted by declaring them dead.On his part, Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa clarified that some “bizarre-looking names” had appeared in the voter list during the recently-held legislative council elections and the reasons behind such mistakes were being looked into and appropriate action was being taken to prevent recurrence.However, he also alleged that “some forged voter slips” had gone viral on social media and the person responsible for the forgery will be dealt with as per law.Last week, he had explained that the software was designed to transliterate names entered in English into Hindi.However, in some cases, instead of transliterating names, it translated the words, resulting in incorrect entries.Rinwa said the errors could have been corrected using the editing feature, but some remained in the final list.As the political fight over the SIR process continues, so does the meme rush on social media.