Discrepancies uncovered during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls — among them, living voters recorded as deceased and registered electors absent from the finalised lists — have come to light across multiple states. Complaints gathered from multiple parts of India point to instances of voter-roll entries being removed without justification, along with system errors and unresolved objections, while the Election Commission has described the broader exercise as a drive to keep electoral records accurate.
A complaint lodged with police in Vijayapura, Karnataka, names BJP legislator Basanagouda Patil Yatnal in connection with claims that falsified death records were used to remove eight names from the electoral rolls. Abdulrajaq Moulasab Bagawan, a vegetable vendor aged 50, told reporters that a booth-level officer's visit for verification had resulted in his name being recorded as deceased in official documents. Of the individuals whose names reportedly appeared on the list, six were women and two were men.
Yatnal has denied any misconduct and has indicated he intends to contest the case in court. A review into the claims is currently under way.
This situation sits within a broader pattern of grievances across Karnataka, where separate complaints have pointed to the use of Form 7 — a mechanism that allows individuals to raise objections to another person's place on the voter roll or formally request their removal — as a vehicle for what petitioners describe as coordinated voter deletion. Alongside those proceedings, the party lodged claims of vote manipulation, with the cases drawing renewed scrutiny toward the protections in place against fraudulent deletion requests.
A broadcast news investigation found that 97 Goa voters whose eligibility had been confirmed by the Electoral Registration Officers handling their applications were nonetheless absent from the finalised electoral roll. A seven-day window saw the Goa Chief Electoral Officer submit eight written appeals to the Election Commission, each one seeking to undo the voter deletions that had already taken place.
According to the report, a core gap lay in ECINet's architecture: the software lacked any capacity to reverse changes, while authority over the necessary technical controls sat with the Commission's central office. Of the 97 names in question, not one appeared on the list once it had taken its definitive shape. In a statement issued afterwards, the ECI noted that its platform had no built-in mechanism to reverse such deletions once they were carried out.
A data entry fault in Maharashtra's provisional voter list assigned a birth year of 1900 to approximately 2.7 lakh registrants, placing their recorded ages in a range spanning 101 to 150 years. Three constituencies within Nashik district bore the brunt of the disruption. According to a broadcast outlet, the state Chief Electoral Officer flagged the discrepancy to the Election Commission on 2 September, yet the correction did not materialise until 6 October — a span attributed to multiple rounds of follow-up communication.
About 3.3 million people across Delhi were sent formal notices requiring them to demonstrate that they qualified for continued inclusion on the provisional electoral roll. Roughly two million cases had been cleared from the dockets in the period leading up to October 12. The figure bundles both approved and rejected applications into a single count, meaning it does not establish that 20 lakh voters were verified and cleared.
The Supreme Court directed the Election Commission of India to account for the reasoning behind a set of notices it had issued, after the body described the underlying grounds as logical inconsistencies. Of the roughly 27 lakh voters removed from rolls during the adjudication process, about 22.2 lakh had filed appeals contesting their exclusion — a figure the Election Commission of India placed before the Supreme Court in the context of West Bengal. A separate tally released by the Commission put the number of appeals contesting the addition of other names at 16.1 lakh.
Questions about how long it takes to work through the backlog of appeals — and return qualifying voters to the rolls — have grown as the number of cases has mounted.
Formal written objections lodged by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi totalled 14 across a ten-month span, with each dissent centred on contested decisions touching voter-roll additions, deletions, and control over electoral-list data, according to a broadcast news investigation. The ECI has said that divergent views within the body are treated as routine, adding that rulings on matters such as the SIR came about through collective agreement among its members.
Voter roll precision, the process for handling challenges, and whether people with legitimate registration status can resolve mistakes before deadlines all came under scrutiny through these cases.
