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, giving eligible residents a second opportunity 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 conducted across all 70 constituencies. They were consequently marked under the categories of absent, shifted, dead and duplicate, collectively described as ASDD. The deleted voters account for 32.8% of the electorate, according to figures reported by the Times of India.
The draft rolls published on August 31 contained 97.5 lakh names, compared with 1.4 crore voters recorded at the beginning of the revision exercise in June. The house-to-house verification drive began on June 30 and continued for nearly seven weeks.
Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Ashok Kumar said the re-verification was intended to ensure that no genuine voter was left out of the final rolls. Booth-level officers, or BLOs, have been instructed to check whether voters classified as ASDD were wrongly deleted. Voters found to have been excluded incorrectly will need to submit Form 6 to seek inclusion.
The deadline for submitting these applications is October 30. Officials have also been directed not to reject applications outright because of minor errors in personal details, according to the report. The disposal of applications and completion of verification will continue until November 30, ahead of publication of the final electoral rolls.
The exercise follows a written communication issued by the Election Commission on September 29, asking states and Union territories to conduct a special drive to include voters who had been left out of the rolls. The move came amid reports that some living voters had been marked as dead, while others who continued to live at their registered addresses had been classified as shifted.
The re-verification of deleted voters is separate from the process involving 33 lakh voters whose names remain in the draft rolls but who received notices over discrepancies in their electoral records. Of these, around 25 lakh cases have reportedly been checked by election officials. More than 19 lakh were flagged for logical discrepancies, including mismatches in names, age-related inconsistencies and differences in family details. Nearly 14 lakh were classified as unmapped because their records could not be linked to the 2002 special intensive revision.
Election officials are targeting October 30 to resolve the notices issued over discrepancies. The Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s office has said that around 20 lakh of the 33 lakh cases had been resolved and asked voters with grievances to contact 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.
In cases where voters cannot be mapped to earlier electoral rolls, BLOs have been instructed to examine the prescribed documents and clear the cases promptly. The re-verification, notice disposal and document checks will determine which names appear in Delhi’s final electoral rolls on December 4.
