The Delhi voter roll revision has exposed a verification gap that is easy to miss in the language of electoral categories. In Jamia Nagar, residents who said they had lived at their registered addresses and voted for years found themselves marked as permanently shifted, dead, untraceable or otherwise flagged for removal from the draft electoral roll. A volunteer-led audit and public hearing in the Okhla Assembly constituency suggest that the problem was not limited to individual confusion: it also involved forms that were not generated, notices that residents said they never received and duplicate voter entries that produced conflicting statuses.
The immediate setting was a Jan Sunwai, or public hearing, organised in Jamia Nagar by Jan Sarokar, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, Voter Adhikar Manch and the National Federation of Indian Women. Around 150 voters registered at the assistance desk to check their electoral status and seek help. The hearing followed an audit conducted between October 9 and 16 across 307 households in Batla House, covering 1,579 voters.
The audit focused on voters appearing on the absent, shifted, dead and duplicate list, the notice list and lists of voters deleted before the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR. The SIR exercise began in June in Delhi, while the draft electoral roll was released in August. According to the organisers, the survey covered about 69% of the 2,296 voters on the relevant lists in the areas surveyed. It therefore does not represent every voter in the constituency or the Capital. But within the group examined, it records a pattern of discrepancies that raises questions about how verification is experienced at street level.
Of the 1,009 voters checked on the ASDD and pre-SIR deletion lists, 100 were found by volunteers to have been wrongly marked for removal even though they continued to live at their registered addresses. Ninety-nine of those cases were listed under the ASDD category and one involved a deletion made before the SIR exercise. Volunteers confirmed 434 cases as correctly listed, while 475 voters could not be traced or verified.
Those figures require careful reading. The audit was conducted by civil society volunteers, and the report does not say that the Election Commission of India has accepted the findings. The 100 cases were identified by the organisers as wrong markings after their own review; they are evidence of a verification problem reported at the local level, not a final official determination about the entire draft roll. The scale is nevertheless important because electoral-roll accuracy depends not only on the rules for deleting entries but also on whether residents can understand, contest and correct decisions affecting them.
Naimuddin’s experience illustrates the institutional confusion that can follow a wrong classification. The Jamia Nagar resident said no booth level officer had visited his home during the SIR exercise. He recalled submitting his enumeration form at a camp near his home in July, but later found that his name and his wife’s name had been marked as permanently shifted in the August draft roll. He told The Indian Express that he had held a driving licence since 1993, graduated from Jamia Millia Islamia in 1999 and had been a voter for more than a decade.
He was advised to submit Form 6 at a special camp in Batla House. Form 6 is used for registering new voters, and Naimuddin questioned why an existing voter should have to use a form intended for new or first-time registration. The episode reveals a practical gap between an administrative remedy and a citizen’s understanding of his status. If an existing voter is wrongly removed or shifted, asking that voter to apply through a new-registration route can make the correction process appear to treat a continuing right as a fresh claim.
Another case involved Anita, who arrived at the hearing with her daughter and four voter ID cards after discovering that her husband had been marked as dead. She said her husband, a carpenter, was alive and that members of her family had been voting for years. A volunteer found that he had two voter ID numbers. One entry had been marked under the dead category, while his name appeared in the draft roll under the second number, which he was reportedly unaware of.
This case points to a different kind of administrative risk. Duplicate entries can be a legitimate reason for scrutiny, but an unresolved duplicate record can also create uncertainty for a person who is physically present and expects the electoral system to identify the correct entry. A category intended to clean the roll can become a source of anxiety when the affected resident does not know which record is active or why one record has been assigned a serious status.
The audit also recorded cases in which residents said they had been unable to fill out their forms and were subsequently marked as untraceable or permanently shifted. Zakir Hussain and Nafisha Begum, residents of Joga Bai Extension, told the organisers that they could not complete their forms and were assigned those categories. The report does not establish why their forms could not be completed or how each classification was made, but it shows how a process designed around enumeration can produce consequences for residents who fail to navigate it successfully.
The notice process created another layer of uncertainty. Of 570 voters on the notice list checked by volunteers, 51 said they had never received the notices they were reportedly served. While 388 said they had received notices, 131 could not be questioned or did not respond. Among the 439 who answered the question, about 12% said they had not received a notice. That distinction matters: the figure does not establish that 12% of all voters on the notice list were denied notice, but it does indicate a substantial gap between recorded service and reported receipt among respondents who answered.
The public hearing functioned as a local interface between the draft roll and residents. By 5.45 pm, 153 voters had received tokens at the hearing desk. Seventy-three were on the ASDD list, 56 were on the notice list, 18 had been deleted before the SIR exercise, five had been cleared in the draft roll and one was not part of the SIR process. Volunteers also helped 73 voters complete Form 6, supporting documents and self-declarations stating that they had been wrongly deleted and were not first-time voters.
This assistance is significant because the draft-roll process is not only a database exercise. It requires residents to identify their status, interpret categories, locate the relevant office or camp, assemble documents and submit a claim or objection within the applicable process. Errors are therefore not experienced as abstract inaccuracies. They become journeys between homes, camps, volunteer desks and election offices, often involving older documents, duplicate identification numbers and uncertainty about which application is appropriate.
The organisers said they conducted the audit to encourage public participation in electoral-roll preparation and referred to Election Commission provisions on disclosure of electoral rolls, claims and objections, and public verification. They said they invited the relevant booth level officers, the Electoral Registration Officer, the District Magistrate and Election Commission officials through the Chief Electoral Officer’s Delhi office. None attended the hearing, according to the report.
That absence is the clearest institutional concern in the episode. A public hearing organised by civil society cannot substitute for the official verification and correction system. But when residents gather with questions about their status, the absence of the officials responsible for the relevant administrative chain leaves volunteers to explain categories and help with forms. It also limits the hearing’s ability to resolve cases immediately. The result is a two-stage process: citizens first discover a problem through a community audit, then seek a formal remedy through the election machinery.
The Delhi experience therefore raises a broader urban governance question: how accessible are essential administrative systems to residents who are present, documented and willing to participate, but whose records have been classified incorrectly? The issue is particularly visible in dense neighbourhoods where households may have multiple identity documents, duplicate or legacy records, changing addresses within the city and varying levels of access to digital or official assistance. The supplied report does not establish how widespread these conditions are across Delhi, nor does it provide an official response to the Jamia Nagar findings. Those limits must remain clear.
What the evidence does establish is narrower and consequential. In the area audited, volunteers identified 100 voters whom they considered wrongly marked for deletion despite continued residence. They found that enumeration forms had not been generated in 27 of 86 wrongly marked ASDD cases where they sought information, while four forms had been generated but remained uncollected. They also recorded residents who said notices had not reached them and a case in which duplicate voter IDs produced conflicting classifications.
The next stage is the formal claims and objections process connected to the draft roll. The hearing helped residents prepare forms and declarations, but the report does not state how many cases were ultimately accepted, rejected or corrected by election officials. That outcome will determine whether the system can convert public participation into verified corrections. Until then, the Jamia Nagar hearing is best understood not as proof that the entire Delhi roll is defective, but as a detailed local test of whether electoral administration can reliably distinguish between a voter who has moved, a voter who has died, a duplicate record and a voter who is alive and still living at the registered address.
