Around 29,000 Form 7 applications — filed largely to request removal of names from electoral rolls and received in Karnataka through October 8, 2026, during the ongoing special intensive revision process — remain absent from the publicly accessible portals of both the State's Chief Electoral Officer and the Election Commission of India.

Assurances from both the CEO and the Election Commission of India had indicated that all Form 7 application records would be open to public inspection, yet those commitments stand in contrast to what has actually transpired.

Between June 16, 2026 — the date on which the pre-SIR rolls were frozen — and October 8, a total of 1,10,654 Form 7 applications had been logged, according to a press statement released on October 9 by the office of CEO V. Anbu Kumar. Of the Form 7 applications lodged during that period, records published on the ECI website account for just 81,822 of them. Of the total applications on record, roughly one in four — a figure amounting to 28,832 — fell into this category, according to what the CEO disclosed.

The absence of any accompanying documentation leaves open the questions of which constituencies hosted these filings, who submitted them, and who stood as the named parties.

Complaints had been lodged about certain individuals submitting multiple Form 7 applications targeting voters across constituencies including Babaleshwar and Bhalki. After Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar lodged a formal objection, the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer, following an inquiry into the matter, instructed District Election Offices to pursue appropriate action, with the directive extending to Shivakumar and the other members of the state Cabinet.

The CEO's notice issued on 24 August 2026, coinciding with the release of the draft Special Summary Revision rolls, indicated that claim and objection lists filed under Forms 9, 10, 11, 11A, and 11B would be made accessible through the CEO Karnataka website, allowing members of the public to review those entries and raise objections with the relevant Electoral Registration Officer. Separately, under the prescribed procedure, Form 7 deletion applications received daily across each Assembly constituency are compiled into Form 10 — the applicable Election Commission of India reporting format — and then uploaded to the website.

Scrutiny of every Form 10 entry lodged on the portal brought the discrepancy to light. Press releases issued by the CEO have at times contained figures on Form 7 applications that differ from one another, a pattern that arises alongside the already-noted gap in submitted documentation.

Between June 16 and August 23, a total of 67,307 Form 7 applications made their way into the system, according to the statement put out on August 24. A statement dated 11 September placed the total for the period running from 16 June through 9 September at 34,631 — a count standing 32,676 below what had previously been reported. A separate release documented 41,792 Form 7 applications lodged across the period from June 16 to September 17, a total that fell 25,515 below the figure recorded on August 23.

As late as September 24 — one day after the window for claims and objections had closed — the CEO's vote count stood at 61,130, leaving a shortfall of 6,177 against the required threshold. By October 8, the total had grown to 1,10,654, a figure confirmed in the statement released the following day.

When the CEO's stated application totals were laid against the portal's own logged records, the numbers failed to align in a consistent direction — some intervals placing the executive's counts above what the system had captured, others showing the gap running the opposite way. Of the 67,307 Form 7 applications the CEO declared had been lodged between 16 June and 23 August, the portal made visible only 6,951 — a gap of 60,356 records that remained beyond public reach.

Breakdowns at the district level emerged from closer examination of the data. Of the 3,061 Form 7 applications logged from Bengaluru Rural across the period running from June 16 to August 23, the portal carried records for just 49 of them, the release indicated. Of the 4,105 applications lodged in Shivamogga, only 17 found their way onto the portal. Of Belagavi's 7,618 total cases, only 1,776 had been entered into the portal.

Karnataka's Chief Electoral Officer, Anbu Kumar, maintained that the window for filing claims and objections ran from August 24 through September 23, offering no further explanation for the discrepancies that had been raised. A gap of 6,177 records separated the two sets of data throughout that window, with the online portal logging 28,097 applications against a lower cumulative count in the chief executive's figures.

Attempts to reach Mr. Anbu Kumar for a response on the follow-up contact went unanswered.