Electoral rolls | The missing millions

Among the boldest promises any nation has made to its people—and one that does India proud—is enshrined in Article 326 of the Constitution. It guarantees that elections to the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies will be based on adult suffrage. Every Indian citizen aged 18 or above, unless disqualified under the Constitution or any law on specified grounds, is “entitled to be registered as a voter”. “Entitled to be registered.” In those four words lies a non-negotiable constitutional principle: the vote is not a favour that the State bestows on its citizens; it is a right they possess. To translate that right into reality, the framers created a constitutional guardian in Article 324, vesting the “superintendence, direction and control” of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections in the Election Commission of India (ECI). The commission is thus not a creature of ordinary law but an independent constitutional body with a twofold responsibility: to conduct free and fair elections and to ensure that every eligible citizen is on the electoral roll and able to exercise the right to vote. Enrolment, therefore, is not merely the citizen’s entitlement, it is a constitutional obligation of the ECI.

Seventy-six years on, the scale of that promise is staggering. India now has more than a billion citizens aged 18 and above, with 2026 estimates ranging from 1.008 billion to 1.017 billion, the largest electorate any democracy has known. On the eve of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, 979.8 million Indians were registered to vote, 7.4 per cent more than in 2019. By January 2025, the rolls had swelled to 991 million, prompting then chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar to declare that India would soon be “a nation of one billion voters”.

But India never quite got there. In June 2025, shortly before the Bihar assembly election, the ECI—now headed by Gyanesh Kumar—launched a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the state’s electoral rolls. Subsequently, it extended the exercise to 30 more states and Union Territories. What was expected to take the country closer to the billion-voter milestone has instead produced a dramatic contraction. The draft rolls across these 31 jurisdictions saw an astounding 133.9 million names deleted. That is 14.1 per cent of their originally listed 950.9 voters—roughly one in seven—and a number equivalent to the entire population of Bihar.

To be fair, this is not the final deletion figure. On November 6, the ECI gave voters excluded from the rolls in seven states and UTs where the SIR is still under way another opportunity to have their names restored, without having to register afresh through Form 6. It has also initiated a Special Summary Revision in 22 of the 24 jurisdictions where final rolls have been published, allowing previously excluded voters to seek restoration and newly eligible citizens to enrol.

However, based on current projections, the exercise could diminish the electorate of the 31 states/UTs to around 835 million, more than 100 million short of the 950.9 million pre-SIR electorate. No electoral revision in India’s history has produced a contraction on this scale. Following the 2002-04 revision, for instance, the electorate grew from 619.5 million in 1999 to 671.5 million in 2004. The massive deletions have triggered protests from the Opposition and brought the entire exercise under Supreme Court scrutiny, with the court seeking a closer examination of the process to determine whether an exercise undertaken to clean up the electoral rolls has ended up excluding millions of eligible voters.

THE MATHEMATICAL GAP

No one disputes that India’s electoral rolls needed cleaning, that the dead, duplicate and long-departed voters needed to be struck off, that non-Indians had no place in them (an oft-repeated charge of the BJP), and that the SIR was the best way to do so. But given the scale of the revision, its credibility would derive from how it was conducted and the numbers it produced. The exercise began in Bihar in June 2025, covering 79 million voters. In October that year, the ECI extended it to 12 more states and UTs, covering approximately 510 million electors. A third phase, announced on May 14 this year, brought another 367 million voters across 16 states and three UTs under scrutiny. In less than a year, therefore, the Commission extended its sweeping revision to approximately 950.9 million voters across 25 states and six UTs. The SIR in Tripura, which has a 2.9 million-strong electorate, will begin only by February next year. Logistical reasons have delayed the inclusion of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh—with a combined electorate of 14.6 million—in the current exercise, while the legal issues around the NRC (National Register of Citizens) have kept out Assam, which boasts an electorate of 24.9 million.

To conduct the SIR, the ECI mobilised more than a million Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and over 1.26 million Booth Level Agents (BLAs) appointed by political parties. Drawn largely from the ranks of government employees—including schoolteachers, revenue officials and other public servants—the BLOs have been the foot soldiers of this colossal operation. Each was assigned a polling station area with around 900 to 1,000 registered voters, spread across an estimated 200 to 250 households, depending on family size and local demographics. The ECI mandated the BLOs to conduct at least three rounds of door-to-door visits, particularly among voters who had been unavailable during earlier visits, distribute partially pre-filled enumeration forms to every registered voter, help verify particulars against earlier electoral rolls—including those prepared during the previous SIR of 2002–04—collect the completed forms and upload the information digitally. The BLAs, meanwhile, were expected to assist voters, flag errors and omissions in the rolls, and monitor the process to ensure that no eligible elector was excluded.

The exercise was overseen at the assembly constituency level by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), assisted by Assistant EROs and BLO supervisors. The EROs were responsible for preparing draft rolls, examining claims and objections, issuing notices where necessary and finalising the electoral register. At the district level, District Elections Officers (DEOs) supervised the process, with a Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) at the state level reporting to the ECI. Voters, too, had a limited window to protect their place on the rolls. After the publication of draft rolls, they had one month to seek inclusion if their names had been left out or correct their particulars. The EROs issued notices to those whose details could not be mapped to earlier electoral rolls or whose particulars did not match the records, and decided each case through a written order before publishing the final rolls. Those aggrieved by an ERO’s decision could appeal to the District Magistrate and subsequently to the chief electoral officer.

Compounding the logistical burden were the tight deadlines within which the exercise had to be completed. It left Opposition parties and electoral experts wondering whether BLOs could realistically discharge such demanding responsibilities without errors, omissions or eligible voters slipping through the cracks. These concerns only grew after the 133.9 million deletions in the draft electoral rolls, an exclusion of hitherto unprecedented proportions.

MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MILLIONS

Asked to explain the large-scale deletions, the ECI responded with ASDD, an initialism encompassing four categories: absent or untraceable (A), shifted residence (S), dead (D) or duplicated (D) in other rolls. In a published break-up, 30.1 million of the 133.9 million were classified as absent or untraceable, 63 million as having shifted residence, 28 million as deceased and 10.2 million as having duplicate registrations. Another 2.6 million fell under the category of ‘others’, covering cases that remained unresolved for various administrative reasons.

In the 24 states and UTs where final rolls have been published, the initial reduction of 88.7 million electors narrowed to 76.5 million, reflecting a net addition of 12.2 million between the draft and final rolls. But this increase includes fresh enrolments and does not necessarily represent the reinstatement of previously excluded voters. Adding the 45.2 million names omitted from the draft rolls in the seven states where the exercise is still under way takes the present combined shortfall to 121.7 million. This leaves 829.2 million electors against a pre-SIR base of 950.9 million. Net additions in these seven states will nudge that up.

The ECI stands on firmest ground with regard to the 38.2 million names classified as deceased or duplicate. Such entries have long clogged the rolls: in six elections between 1984-85 and 1999, registered voters outnumbered the voting-age population, pointing to a large build-up of dead, shifted or duplicate names. Between 9.3 million and 10 million registered adults die each year, yet the 2024 summary revision removed only 6.78 million deceased electors. If deaths outpaced deletions by 2.5 million to 3.5 million a year, ECI supporters argue, as many as 28 million stale entries could pile up over a decade.

But that leads one to another question: what was the ECI doing during its routine revisions of the electoral rolls? Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, it had undertaken an extensive Special Summary Revision (SSR), as mandated by established practice. In its February 9, 2024, report, it announced the deletion of nearly 16.58 million names following house-to-house verification by BLOs. These included 6.78 million deceased electors, 7.51 million who had permanently shifted or were absent, and 2.21 million duplicate entries. At the same time, more than 26.3 million new voters were enrolled, taking the country’s electorate to 979.8 million. The ECI had hailed the exercise as a major achievement in ensuring the accuracy and integrity of electoral rolls. Yet barely a year later, the SIR has produced vastly larger numbers of deletions from the draft rolls. Was the earlier verification inadequate, then, or are the current SIR’s criteria and procedures so different that they have excluded otherwise eligible voters?

WHEN HASTE MADE WASTE

The breakneck speed at which the SIR has been conducted is another point of concern. In a little over a year, it is attempting to cover 96 per cent of the country’s electorate, even though the rolls have ballooned to close to a billion. The previous intensive revision in 2002-04, when the electorate numbered 638 million, had followed a very different timeline. Bihar’s 2002-03 revision, conducted alongside those in Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Punjab, took 243 days. The first 74 days were devoted to training, surveys and booth rationalisation. By contrast, Bihar’s 2025 SIR, which set the current exercise in motion, was completed in just 98 days, from June 24 to September 30, with barely five weeks left before polling. Training, booth rationalisation and house-to-house enumeration were compressed into just 31 days. The second phase, ordered on October 27, 2025, gave the ECI a little over 90 days to scrutinise the records of approximately 510 million voters across 12 states and UTs.

Labelling such objections as “misconceived, erroneous and unsustainable”, the ECI told the Supreme Court that door-to-door enumeration in 2003 also took about a month. But the issue was more than just the time taken; it was as much about the method of enumeration and the burden of proof. Article 326 may guarantee the right to be registered as a voter, but the 2025 SIR effectively made inclusion contingent on voters establishing their eligibility all over again. In 2003, enumerators carried existing electoral rolls and voter identity cards, verified residence and age, and filled in the entries themselves. This time, every voter was required to return an enumeration form and, in many cases, establish a link to electoral rolls dating back two decades. Former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa argues that this reversed the onus of inclusion, shifting the burden from the state to the citizen. Former chief election commissioner O.P. Rawat recalls that BLOs earlier visited households, checked ages and updated records themselves. Under the current SIR, households were expected to produce documentary evidence, often without adequate assistance for labourers, migrants and the poor—the very sections least likely to have the required paperwork.

The choice of states and the timing of the exercise added to the suspicion. Bihar went first, ahead of its November 2025 assembly election. Phase II covered West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, four of the five states/UTs that went to the polls in April-May 2026. Phase III includes states such as Punjab, Uttarakhand and Manipur, which are scheduled to vote in early 2027. The contrast with 2002-03 is instructive. UP, Punjab and Uttarakhand had voted three months before that revision began, while MP and Chhattisgarh went to the polls only in December 2003. Their electoral rolls thus had time to settle before the next round of elections. Opposition parties argue that scheduling the SIR between election cycles, rather than immediately before crucial polls, would have cost the ECI nothing. They accuse the Commission of acting at the Modi government’s behest—a charge that the ECI rejects.

THE SOFTWARE CHOKEPOINT

There are other questions that the ECI must answer. In its seeming haste to complete the SIR, it has relied heavily on automated processes within ECINet, its integrated digital platform for managing voter registration, electoral rolls and other election-related operations. But the dependence on technology appears to have introduced errors of its own. In Telangana, 7.3 million of the state’s 33.8 million electors—21.7 per cent—were missing from the August 17 draft rolls, most classified as absent or having shifted residence. In Hyderabad’s Malakpet and Yakutpura constituencies, the number of deleted names exceeded the votes cast in the 2023 assembly election. ERONET, the software used to manage electoral rolls, generated Form 7 deletion applications in which EROs were listed as objectors. Names were also deleted through a mobile app before the draft rolls were published.

The law does empower EROs to initiate deletions on their own under Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. But proposed deletions must be displayed publicly, objections considered and reasonable efforts made to hear the voter. Rules 16 to 20 prescribe the procedure for Form 7 objections, including publication in Form 10. Yet, in several constituencies, ASDD exclusions were not displayed through this prescribed process before names were removed. In UP, Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa confirmed that 87,127 software-generated deletion applications, signed by officials, had been processed after the claims deadline, without recording reasons as required under the SIR’s guidelines.

The discrepancies between the digital records and the reality on the ground have been equally troubling. An October audit by the Telangana Voter Rights Forum found that 42 of 95 people marked for deletion in Musheerabad were still living at the addresses recorded in the rolls. A soldier posted in UP was marked untraceable at his home in Secunderabad Cantonment. A professor received a notice because the dates of birth of his twin sons triggered a discrepancy. In three Hyderabad constituencies, around 60 people classified as dead sought restoration of their names—one was just 24 years old. In Rajasthan, 182,440 of approximately 875,000 electors declared dead during the SIR continued to appear on the panchayat rolls revised just four days later. In UP’s Pilibhit district, an independent audit of 55 polling booths found 2,691 entries in which voters’ identities had been replaced even as their EPIC numbers remained unchanged—all the affected voters were Muslim. On August 19 alone, 656 such changes were made in just 7.4 minutes. The ECI ordered action against two EROs on October 31 but has yet to explain how its system permitted changes of this nature without verification. Recently, UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath raised the same worry from the other side: the omission of approximately 12.7 million Hindu voters, including welfare beneficiaries and young voters aged 18-19, who were present in panchayat records but missing from the ECI rolls. His government has asked the Commission to restore the names of those eligible.

West Bengal illustrates the potentially irreversible consequences of errors in the SIR process. Its draft rolls excluded 5.8 million names, or 7.6 per cent of the previous 76.6-million-strong electorate. Deceased voters accounted for 41.5 per cent of the deletions, the highest proportion among large states. The software subsequently flagged 13.6 million electors for what it termed ‘logical discrepancies’. These included misspelt fathers’ names, parent-child age gaps of less than 15 or more than 50 years, and cases in which one parent was linked to six or more children. Around six million cases were sent for adjudication. Judicial officers eventually found 3.27 million voters eligible and 2.72 million ineligible. The published rolls shrank from approximately 70.8 million at the draft stage to 70.46 million, and then to around 67.74 million after adjudication. Appeal tribunals headed by retired High Court judges began functioning only on April 13. Before the May assembly election, they had restored just 1,607 names. Post-election, between 80 and 91 per cent of decided appeals resulted in reinstatement. The success of such a high proportion of appeals raised serious questions about the accuracy of the original exclusions. Those whose names were restored after polling had already lost their opportunity to vote in an election that cannot be rerun.

The rigidity of ECINet also became apparent to electoral officials themselves. On September 24, Maharashtra Chief Electoral Officer S. Chockalingam wrote to the Commission that the system was preventing EROs from exercising powers apportioned to them under the law. He sought four changes: permission to waive unnecessary hearings, accept documents beyond the 13 listed in notices, allow EROs to decide logical-discrepancy cases without automatic referral to district officers, and dispense with the uploading of a redundant extract of the previous SIR roll. The ECI agreed to allow hearings to be waived on September 26 and subsequently approved all four changes. On October 14, it announced an ECINet audit committee comprising specialists from IIT Bombay and IISc Bengaluru. But an audit after the event can only be an exercise in damage assessment rather than prevention.

DEATH BY FORMS

Barely had voters come to terms with exclusion of their names when another nightmare began: the struggle to get their names back on the electoral rolls. Indian electors have to fill three forms to feature in the electoral rolls: Form 6 for first-time enrolment, Form 7 for objections and deletions, and Form 8 for corrections or change of address. Yet voters who figured in the electoral rolls before the SIR but found their names missing in the drafts were instructed to fill Form 6. This effectively required people who may have voted for decades to declare themselves as first-time applicants, exposing them to the threat of up to a year’s imprisonment for a false declaration under Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. Some applicants were even issued new EPIC numbers, breaking the link with their previous electoral records. Unsurprisingly, many chose not to apply at all.

The issue eventually reached the courts. On October 14, the Delhi High Court rejected fears that such applicants would face prosecution, while the Supreme Court questioned the rationale for treating previously enrolled voters as first-time applicants. On November 3, the ECI directed all states that no ERO could prosecute a previously enrolled voter merely for filing Form 6. Earlier, on October 21, it had removed from the online Form 6 a declaration requiring applicants to establish family links with the previous SIR’s rolls. The declaration was made a separate document, although the requirement continued in states where the SIR was under way. Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi had formally raised this objection: inserting such a declaration into a statutory form required a formal amendment of the rules.

Form 7 became another flashpoint. In West Bengal, ECI software generated 538,320 Form 7 entries, compared with approximately 102,000 objections filed by voters and political parties. Separately, 1.61 million appeals challenged the inclusion of voters who had already been cleared by judicial officers. More than 1.2 million of these appeals carried the same filing date—April 5, just before the electoral rolls were frozen. It prompted Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu to ask who had authorised and filed them without the knowledge of the other commissioners or the state’s chief electoral officer. In an October 26 affidavit, the ECI said state chief electoral officers had acted under powers permitted by the Supreme Court, adding that the matter “was not brought to the Commission”. The appeals remain pending.

GOING AFTER THE GHUSPAITHIYAS

The ECI had pitched the SIR not merely as an exercise to authenticate electoral rolls but also as a hunt for infiltrators. When it began in Bihar, ECI officials said field workers had found people from Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar on the rolls. Union home minister Amit Shah has repeatedly made the same argument. In Hyderabad on November 2, he linked the 30.1 million voters classified as ‘absent or untraceable’ to Bangladeshi infiltrators. But the evidence has not followed the rhetoric. According to ECI sources, ‘absent or untraceable’ simply means that a BLO visited the voter’s registered address three times, checked with neighbours and political party booth agents, but could not establish where the person had gone. The classification says nothing about nationality. Nor do any of the ASDD categories identify a foreign national.

Likewise, there is little clarity on the 2.6 million voters placed under the category of ‘others’. Some cases were referred to competent authorities over doubts about citizenship, but the category also includes unsigned, refused or late enumeration forms and voters who requested deletion of their names. On May 27, the Supreme Court directed the ECI to provide, within four weeks, the names deleted on grounds of doubtful citizenship. More than five months later, no such list has reached the Centre. An exercise partly justified by the need to detect infiltrators has yet to produce a national count of those allegedly found on the rolls.

The Supreme Court has emerged as the principal institutional check on the exercise. In August 2025, it compelled the ECI, which had maintained it was under no legal obligation to publish the names of excluded voters, to disclose details and reasons for the exclusion of around 6.5 million electors in Bihar. On September 8, 2025, it directed the ECI to accept Aadhaar as the 12th identity document. It subsequently questioned the requirement that previously enrolled voters apply as first-time electors. On May 27, it also sought the list of deletions on grounds of doubtful citizenship, which remains outstanding. The court’s concerns also preceded the ECI’s November 6 decision to reopen enumeration in the seven states where the exercise remained unfinished. At the same time, it allowed the ECI to proceed with the Bihar and Bengal polls despite serious discrepancies in the rolls and allegations that particular sections of voters had been targeted.

The court’s interventions have also yet to resolve the central question: how many eligible voters were wrongly excluded, and how many will find their way back onto the rolls? Deaths, duplication and shifting may account for some of the 133.9 million deletions in the draft rolls, but tens of millions of eligible citizens remain excluded even in the final rolls. The 76.5 million net deletions across 24 states and UTs warrant close scrutiny, as do the 45.2 million names missing in the draft rolls of the seven states where the exercise is under way. Every citizen whose name was erroneously removed must have a fair and accessible opportunity to have their voting right—guaranteed by Article 326 of the Constitution—reinstated. Until the ECI can demonstrate that no eligible voter has been denied that opportunity, the SIR risks going down as a moment in history when India’s electoral process took a step backwards.