Delhi SIR: Poll body to step up door-to-door re-verification of 47.5 lakh deleted voters

New Delhi: A day after the Election Commission extended the deadlines for the SIR exercise in Delhi, poll officials on Friday said they were planning to step up door-to-door re-verification of 47.56 lakh voters excluded from the draft electoral rolls published on August 31.

Senior officials said special camps for voter enrolment, including students, homeless, transgender persons and sex workers, were also being considered for November 15 and 22.

The office of the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) had earlier directed officials to revisit the deleted entries and verify whether the excluded voters were eligible for inclusion in the final electoral roll.


While the exercise is nearly complete, officials said the extended timelines could allow another round of verification.

The exercise will involve all 14,947 booth-level officers (BLOs) deployed across the city, including government school teachers carrying out SIR-related duties since June 30.

Around 32 lakh of the more than 33 lakh cases in which electors were issued notices over non-mapping with the 2002 electoral roll or "logical discrepancies" have been resolved so far, the officials said.

In a late-evening announcement on Thursday, the Election Commission of India extended the deadline for filing claims and objections from October 31 to November 25 and revised the subsequent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) timelines for the national capital.

According to the revised schedule, the claims and objections received will be disposed of by December 15, and the final electoral roll will be published on December 22.

The previous deadline for the disposal process was November 30, and the final electoral roll was to be published on December 4.

The latest extension came a day after the Supreme Court asked the poll panel to consider extending the deadline for filing applications by voters.

Along with Delhi, the Election Commission also revised the SIR schedule for five other states -- Maharashtra, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Nagaland.

After 47.56 lakh electors were excluded from Delhi's draft electoral rolls published on August 31, the poll body received 2,75,856 Form 6 applications between August 31 and October 28.

Form 6 is used by eligible voters seeking inclusion in the electoral rolls, Form 7 for deletion of names and Form 8 for correction or modification of existing entries.