Aaditya Thackeray has alleged that around five lakh suspected “ghost voters” in Mumbai cannot be traced in either the draft electoral roll prepared during the Special Intensive Revision or the list of deleted voters, while the Election Commission of India has attributed the differences to the removal of duplicate registrations.
The Shiv Sena (UBT) MLA said on Friday that his party would conduct a door-to-door verification exercise to establish the status of the voters. His presentation questioned whether the missing entries had been properly accounted for during the revision of the electoral rolls.
ECI officials rejected the ghost-voter allegation and said the variation in voter numbers resulted from an exercise to identify and remove duplicate registrations. According to the officials, the exercise included entries with similar photographs and demographic details. Lists of identified entries had also been published on the Maharashtra Chief Electoral Officer’s website, they said.
The dispute also concerns changes in the total number of registered voters in Maharashtra. Thackeray cited an ECI figure of 9,86,44,413 voters on May 26, 2026, compared with 9,78,54,049 on August 31, 2026. That represents a decline of 7,90,364 voters. He also referred to a figure of 9,71,41,289 voters recorded for the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections.
Thackeray’s presentation claimed that around five lakh Mumbai voters were absent from both the draft roll and the list of absent, shifted, dead and duplicate voters, commonly referred to as the ASDD list. It also questioned an allegedly inactive link to the ASDD list, raising concerns about how voters could verify whether their names had been removed or categorised.
The presentation cited Bhiwandi East Assembly constituency as another case requiring scrutiny. It stated that 1,91,691 voters had cast ballots in the 2024 Assembly election, while the 2026 SIR draft roll contained 1,91,446 voters—a difference of 245. Thackeray questioned why the draft roll figure was lower than the number of people who had voted in the earlier election.
A separate example concerned Mahim Assembly constituency, where Thackeray claimed that around 900 voters at one polling booth appeared in both the 2002 electoral roll and the 2026 SIR draft roll but were still being asked to establish their eligibility. According to the presentation, the Electoral Registration Officer attributed the problem to software failing to map the records.
The competing explanations point to the administrative challenge of maintaining accurate electoral rolls in a large and mobile urban population. Duplicate records, changes in residence, deaths, data-mapping failures and difficulties in communicating deletions can affect both the integrity of voter lists and citizens’ ability to confirm their eligibility. The material supplied does not establish whether the five lakh entries were ineligible, duplicated, wrongly deleted or otherwise accounted for.
The allegations come ahead of a protest called by the Cockroach Janta Party at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on Saturday. The protest is seeking the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in electoral rolls. The Election Commission’s explanation and the party’s proposed door-to-door verification are the next stated steps in the dispute.
