Around 16 states and Union Territories that fall outside the current Special Summary Revision cycle have yet to receive their scheduled annual Special Summary Revision of electoral rolls, a process that has stalled amid reported disagreements among senior officials at the Election Commission.

A court dispute from 1980–81 draws attention for what it revealed about three intertwined obligations: keeping electoral rolls in a state of readiness, safeguarding the voting rights of newly registered citizens, and documenting the grounds on which any decision to forgo roll revision rests.

Two points of contention surfaced within the Commission: the Attorney General's written opinion placed before senior members, and the matter of the Hegde case from 1980–81. According to people with knowledge of the matter, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi interpreted both the Attorney General's opinion and the inputs from the Hegde case as favouring the restoration of the Summary Special Revision to its annual footing — a cycle that had continued without interruption across many years before being paused following 2024, then dropped from the schedule altogether in 2025, with no date yet confirmed for 2026 and the process now trailing behind its traditional May-to-July timetable.

According to sources with knowledge of the matter, both Election Commissioners put forward the position that established rules, past practice, and legal guidance collectively point to the four qualifying dates set by the Election Commission being bound to the Summary Revision of Rolls process — meaning those dates cannot be operationalised independently of it, regardless of whether prospective voters have already submitted Form 6 applications for inclusion in the electoral rolls through the ongoing continuous updation mechanism.

Those individuals' names are not guaranteed to appear on the official electoral register until the annual roll is published each January, following completion of the standard SSR process — a step that did not take place in January 2025, and with the SSR process still on hold, the January 2026 publication window may also pass without their inclusion.

A legal matter involving Ramakrishna Hegde was brought before the courts. A matter pending before the Delhi High Court involving the Election Commission of India formed part of the deliberations. Proceedings began after Hegde, occupying the post of general secretary within the Janata Party at the time, filed a legal challenge questioning whether the electoral rolls underpinning three 1981 parliamentary by-elections — held in Kheri, Gulbarga, and Keonjhar — were valid.

In Hegde's submission, the election authority had departed from the procedural requirements set out under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, with the consequence that a number of voters — first-time young voters in particular — were stripped of their ability to cast ballots before polling day.

The ruling acknowledged both positions: an unfinished electoral roll revision could not legitimately be invoked to obstruct a scheduled vote, yet the bench also recognised the constitutional obligation placed on the Election Commission to verify that every individual who had reached the then-applicable voting age of 21 years appeared on the register.

In its written order, the Delhi High Court bench directed that the Election Commission maintain current electoral rolls and remain prepared to conduct elections or by-elections whenever the need arises. Among the ruling's other elements, the bench held that electoral-roll updates fall within the ECI's statutory obligations, with the legislation requiring those revisions to be carried out as frequently as circumstances demand. Under Section 21(2)(a) of the Representation of People's Act, the EC holds the authority to forgo revision, with any such decision carrying a requirement that the underlying reasons be documented in written form.

No formal statement on the matter had been issued by the EC at the time of publication, though internal indications pointed toward a Special Summary Revision being rolled out exclusively for the five states and union territories scheduled to hold assembly elections in early 2027 — Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa, and Manipur. Setting aside the 19 states and union territories currently under Phase 3 of the Special Intensive Revision, a separate count still places 16 states and union territories among those where the matter applies.

Voter rolls in Himachal Pradesh, along with those covering the Union Territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir, remain tied to the 2024 electoral register. Throughout 2025, no Special Status Review was carried out at those locations, and none has been scheduled for 2026 either, with those involved still waiting on the Statutory Inspection Report, which is not expected to take place until the following year.

The state's voter list, compiled following the nation's first Special Intensive Revision exercise and released at the close of September, remains the document guiding Bihar's electoral process in 2025. Roughly a dozen additional states and Union Territories covered under Phase 2 of the SIR exercise are absent from the SSR process, among them several jurisdictions where assembly elections are scheduled in early 2027.

Following the removal of roughly 13 crore names from electoral rolls under the SIR process, the Election Commission of India on Saturday asked Booth Level Officers to place current voter lists alongside pre-SIR versions, identify anyone dropped in that comparison, and then conduct door-to-door visits to help those individuals get their names restored within a month.