Delhi election officials have begun re-verifying 47.6 lakh voters whose names were deleted from the draft electoral rolls during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR), giving eligible residents until October 30 to seek inclusion before the final rolls are published on December 4.
The voters were excluded after enumeration forms could not be collected during a house-to-house verification exercise and were classified under the categories of absent, shifted, dead and duplicate (ASDD). They represent 32.8% of Delhi’s electorate. The draft rolls published on August 31 contained 97.5 lakh names, compared with 1.4 crore at the start of the revision exercise in June.
Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Ashok Kumar said the re-verification was aimed at ensuring that no genuine voter was excluded from the final rolls. Booth-level officers (BLOs) have been instructed to check whether voters marked under ASDD were wrongly removed from the draft rolls. Voters found to have been incorrectly deleted will have to submit Form 6 for inclusion.
The re-verification is taking place across all 70 Assembly constituencies. Officials have also been directed not to reject applications outright because of minor errors in personal details. The Election Commission asked states and Union territories in a written communication on September 29 to conduct a special drive to include voters who had been left out of the rolls.
The exercise follows reports that some living voters were classified as dead and that residents who had not moved from their registered addresses were marked as shifted. An official said BLOs were verifying these cases alongside their work on notices issued to voters over discrepancies in electoral records.
The deleted voters are separate from 33 lakh people whose names remain in the draft rolls but who have received SIR notices over discrepancies. Of these notices, around 25 lakh had been checked and verified by election officials, according to the report. More than 19 lakh cases were flagged for logical discrepancies, including differences in names, age-related inconsistencies and variations in family details. Nearly 14 lakh voters were classified as unmapped because their records could not be linked to the 2002 SIR.
The Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s office said in a post on X that around 20 lakh of the 33 lakh discrepancy cases had been resolved. It said voters with grievances could approach any of Delhi’s 14,947 BLOs, 902 Assistant Electoral Registration Officers, 70 Electoral Registration Officers, 13 District Election Officers or the Chief Electoral Officer’s office.
For voters whose records could not be mapped to earlier electoral rolls, BLOs have been asked to resolve cases after collecting and checking the prescribed documents. The disposal of SIR notices and completion of the verification process will continue until November 30. The final electoral rolls are scheduled for publication on December 4.
