The curious case of Delhi’s voters who went missing before SIR

Delhi’s draft voter roll after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) revealed deletion of 47.5 lakh voters. But an analysis of just eight polling booths in north-west Delhi’s Mangolpuri brought to light another problem: nearly one in five voters never even made it into the SIR process.On September 5, five days after the draft rolls were published, heavy rain did not stop people in Mangolpuri from turning up at their polling booths to find out if their names were there. Voters moved from counter to counter, stopping volunteers and anyone else who might be able to help. The question was often the same: am I still a voter?Among them was 72-year-old Laxmi Devi Verma, who was born in Delhi and has been a resident of Mangolpuri since her marriage. She limped between counters, increasingly exasperated as her name failed to turn up anywhere. She did not know whether she had been removed from the rolls, and if so, why.Volunteers from Jan Sarokar, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), and Voter Adhikar Manch first searched for her name in the draft electoral roll. It was not there. They then checked the list of voters classified as absent, shifted, dead, or duplicate (ASDD). Her name did not figure there as well. “I never got the SIR form. Everyone was given one by the booth level officer [BLO], but I did not get it,” Verma said. Verma was a registered voter. Frontline cross-checked her details against the January 2025 electoral roll, used for the Delhi Assembly election that year. Her name appears there, registered under the Sultanpur Majra constituency.As it turned out, Verma’s case was only one among many such deletions. Citizen volunteers and civil society representatives under the banner of Jan Sarokar, MKSS, and Voter Adhikar Manch have gone from house to house across eight polling booths in Mangolpuri’s Y-Block, verifying nearly 10,000 voters.Their exercise identified three groups: thousands who remained on the draft rolls; about 2,800 who were on the ASDD list; and roughly 1,800 whose names were missing from the draft rolls and the ASDD list (although they appeared on the 2025 electoral roll). In other words, the names of nearly one in every five voters who were checked were missing altogether.

Volunteers scaning voter rolls to help people identify their names on the lists, in Delhi, on September 5. | Photo Credit: Shubhangi Derhgawen This finding has been partially independently tested. Of the 1,800 names identified as missing from both lists, Frontline cross-checked 1,326 against the 2025 electoral roll and found all 1,326 registered there.The scale of the finding is small: these missing names come from just eight out of Delhi’s 14,947 polling booths. The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) headline figure of 47.5 lakh deletions in Delhi captures voters removed during the SIR exercise. But these 1,326 voters are not part of that story at all. So where did they go?Missing record of deletionsFrontline asked the BLOs in-charge of the exercise in these areas how voters on the 2025 electoral rolls could now be missing from both lists.BLOs Deepak Kumar and Pushpa were in-charge of an area in which the citizen audit identified 271 such missing names. Pushpa was unavailable for comment. Deepak suggested that the voters may have been removed during the annual revision of electoral lists conducted between January 2025 and January 2026. “The revised list that was shared in January 2026 is not available in the public domain. That is the list we referred to,” he told Frontline. According to him, the revised 2026 list was not made public this year because the SIR exercise was approaching. “Their names have probably been removed in that list,” he said.Another BLO, Neelam, was in-charge of an area in which 53 voters were missing from both lists. She offered another possible explanation: their names may have been deleted after somebody filed Form 7. (Form 7 is used to seek the deletion of an existing elector, including on grounds such as death, permanent shifting, or duplicate enrolment.) “If someone else had raised it or sometimes when landowners themselves file these forms, then their names must have been deleted from the list,” she said.

Volunteers cross-checking 2025 voter rolls to locate those whose names are missing from the draft SIR rolls, in Delhi, on September 5.   | Photo Credit: Shubhangi Derhgawen But deletion from an electoral roll is supposed to leave a trail. ECI procedures require verification before a name can be removed. In cases other than confirmed deaths, the elector is supposed to be served notice and given a reasonable opportunity to be heard.The ECI’s note explaining annual revision and updation of electoral rolls states: “No entry from the electoral roll can be deleted without following the due procedure.” Proposed additions and deletions are also not meant to remain invisible. Lists of claims and objections prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, are required to be displayed publicly, including through the electoral authorities, before they are decided.This makes the explanation offered by the BLOs unacceptable. If these voters disappeared during an earlier revision, there should be a record of how and why each name was removed. There are other unanswered questions regarding the 1,326 voters Frontline verified using the 2025 rolls: were they formally deleted between the January 2025 roll and the SIR, and if so, on what grounds? Were notices served and field verifications conducted?Frontline has sought the relevant records and an explanation from the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer but has not received a response. The story will be updated when there is a response. For voters like Verma, the immediate solution being offered also creates another problem. BLOs told Frontline that those whose names have been left out will now have to submit Form 6 (the application used for enrolment of new voters), along with the documents required under the SIR process. For Verma, that means being asked to register afresh. “When I have been a voter for so many years, why will I be registered as a new voter now?” she asked. “I vote every year. How can a voter just disappear from this process without any information?”A possibly larger discrepancyThe discrepancy may extend beyond the eight booths Frontline examined. Delhi’s district-wise electoral rolls recorded 1.56 crore voters as of January 17, 2025. But when the SIR began, the ECI said Delhi had 1.45 crore registered electors. That is a difference of more than 11 lakh voters, or about 7 per cent of Delhi’s electorate, whose names were missing before the SIR exercise even began.It is not clear how many of these voters were legitimately deleted, shifted to other constituencies, or otherwise removed during revisions conducted between the two exercises. But the gap becomes significant in light of what Frontline found in Mangolpuri.Carina Singh, a lawyer and activist with Jan Sarokar, said volunteers encountered such cases repeatedly during their door-to-door verification. When they raised them with BLOs, she said, the immediate explanation was simply that the names were not on the lists available to them. “These are people who voted last year. Their vote is what helped the formation of the government in 2025,” Singh said. “And now they aren’t voters at all?”For Delhi, then, the question does not begin with the 47.5 lakh voters deleted during SIR. It begins earlier: how many voters disappeared from the rolls before the SIR count even started, and where is the record of what happened to their names?Shubhangi Derhgawen is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.Also Read | The scary cost of SIR | Sagrika RajoraAlso Read | Who is an Indian citizen?