Delhi’s voter roll reckoning
As booth-level officers begin a door-to-door count of 1.45 crore voters, Delhi inherits an exercise that has already convulsed Bihar and Bengal
From this week, more than 13,000 booth-level officers are fanning out across Delhi’s 70 assembly constituencies to verify the capital’s voters. This is Delhi’s first Special Intensive Revision (SIR) since 2002: every name must now be matched against that decades-old roll, and those who cannot be linked to it — chiefly newer residents and migrants — must produce prescribed documents or trace their parentage back to 2002. The Election Commission, invoking its constitutional mandate under Article 324 and Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, frames this as simple record-keeping: no eligible citizen left out, no ineligible name retained, after decades of unchecked urbanisation and migration. That administrative logic carries real political weight.
The SIR was first tested in Bihar last year, where roughly 65 lakh names were struck off ahead of the state election, prompting opposition allegations that the poor, migrants and minorities were being quietly thinned out. After weeks of hearings, the Supreme Court on May 27, 2026, unanimously upheld the exercise as within the Commission’s mandate, while ordering safeguards: citizenship-linked deletions must go to a competent authority with notice and hearing, and wrongly dropped voters retain a right to judicial review.
Nearly six crore names had been removed nationwide — including in West Bengal, where the Commission admitted a flawed algorithm had wrongly flagged over a crore names. Locally, the politics cut sharper: the BJP, having recently reclaimed both the Assembly and the municipal corporation from the AAP, has welcomed the drive and accused rivals of inflating rolls; the AAP and Congress echo the disenfranchisement fears raised elsewhere.
For Delhi, the stakes are concrete. This is a city of transience — renters who shift addresses every few years, lakhs of migrant workers in unauthorised colonies, women who relocate after marriage — exactly the voters earlier SIR rounds struggled to capture cleanly.
Officials concede the mapping was already squeezed by an overlapping Census house-listing exercise, leaving a tight runway to the October 7 final roll. Get this wrong, and the consequences will outlast this revision, shaping the 2027 municipal polls and beyond. Avoiding the glitches seen elsewhere — app outages, forms dumped at tea stalls, overworked BLOs, citizens panicked by clerical slips — will take more than good intentions.
The Commission should keep its software biased toward inclusion, publish any flagged names locally and early enough to be corrected, and ensure BLOs actually reach migrant bastis and rental clusters, not just the easiest doors. Political parties’ booth agents and independent observers should be allowed to watch the process as it happens, not only audit it afterward.
The Supreme Court has given the Commission legitimacy and a rulebook; Delhi’s task is to use both. The real test of this SIR is not how many names it adds or removes, but whether, on October 7, voters trust the list they find themselves on.
