Maharashtra CEO suggested changes to SIR form to ease voter stress, BLO load; ECI ignored

New Delhi: A week after ECI announced SIR Phase 3 on May 14, the chief electoral officer of Maharashtra is learnt to have written to the poll panel flagging concerns over the tedious enumeration form filling requirements and the issue of logical discrepancies, ET has learnt. He suggested simpler methods to ease the burden on voters by making changes to the enumeration form, a step that would also have reduced the workload of booth-level officers (BLOs). ECI, however, was largely unresponsive to these significant suggestions, sources in the know indicated.

On May 21, a week after phase 3 was announced for 19 states and Union Territories, including Maharashtra, CEO S Chockalingam wrote to ECI with "suggestions regarding the enumeration form". He suggested that "details of electors/relatives available in the electoral roll of the last SIR may be pre-filled in the enumeration form in cases where mapping is available".

He added that records with "anomalies" be "excluded from such pre-filling" to allow them to be addressed separately. "This would save considerable time and effort for BLOs during field verification," the CEO wrote. ECI, however, did not include these changes.


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The CEO also made another key suggestion with reference to "logical discrepancy" - a new system devised by ECI from Phase 2 of SIR, under which voter records are red-flagged for a variety of reasons, from name-spelling errors to "odd" age gaps between parents and children and so on. This has led to lakhs of "notices" being issued to electors, requiring them to appear for a "hearing" to ensure their inclusion in the final roll. Chockalingam had a simple remedy: Allow voters to correct the discrepancy and sign off on it. "In cases where any discrepancy is noticed in the mapped data, the elector may be allowed to correct the details and affix his/her signature against the corrected entries. Blank enumeration forms may also be used in such cases."

The CEO also proposed a diglot enumeration form - in Marathi and English - the latter for urban voters in Mumbai and Pune, to "facilitate better understanding and convenience for electors". On 09.09.2025, as the poll panel was readying to announce SIR Phase 2, the CEO had written to ECI seeking "deferring SIR in Maharashtra due to elections to local bodies".

In fact, with the poll panel largely unresponsive to many such concerns, several CEOs are learnt to have made relaxations at the ground level to ease the process for voters and ensure their inclusion, ET gathers.

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"Logical discrepancies spawned a huge number of notices, and we found that most were absolutely eligible voters. At our own level, we gave instructions to include such people in the roll without further harassment or document checks. The BLO was anyway able to identify and establish the same easily. That apart, there were certainly motivated bulk Form 7 applications which was a cause for serious concern and could have led to disenfranchisement. We accordingly rejected the bulk Form 7 applications in our state," a CEO told ET on condition of anonymity.



Top officials from Bihar, the first state to go to SIR in 2025, told ET that they eased the document process on the basis of ground feedback and cautioned the poll panel on the need to include Aadhaar. "We informed the poll panel right at the start when SIR was being launched in the state that Aadhaar must be included, but the ECI in its wisdom did not do so in its 24.09.2025 order. It later had to include it after the Supreme Court directed the same. That apart, Bihar had a unique situation - many cases of intermarriages between Bihar and Nepal families in border districts have existed for decades, and mostly such women would lose voting rights under the SIR rulebooks. We chose to largely retain them on the electoral rolls. While there was considerable ECI push to check for voter roll entries of illegal persons, we did not really find any," the official told ET on condition of confidentiality.