Delhi's chief electoral officer Ashok Kumar said on Friday that booth-level officers throughout the capital have been tasked with re-verifying all 4.7 million entries flagged for removal under the ongoing special intensive revision, a step designed to ensure each name receives an additional round of scrutiny before being permanently deleted from the electoral rolls.
Around 15,000 personnel — drawn predominantly from government school teaching rolls and having spent nearly four months on the Special Intensive Revision exercise — are visiting households across the city, with the drive already under way in parts of Delhi and set to conclude by 30 October. Throughout the enumeration phase, each registered voter's address was to receive a minimum of three separate visits from an assigned officer.
Kumar stated that an exercise had been ordered to verify whether any mistakes occurred in the process and to determine if any voter had been omitted from the rolls. Of the 3.3 million notices flagged for either non-mapping against the 2002 base roll or logical discrepancy, approximately 2.5 million had been addressed by the time Kumar spoke.
Booth-level officers have additionally received guidance that registration applications containing small clerical errors in personal particulars are not to face outright dismissal. Where data entries fail to align with earlier rolls or fall outside expected mapping parameters, booth-level officers have been directed to help voters resolve minor inconsistencies in personal information or recorded age. Under that provision, poll workers are authorised to request supporting documentation and verify the identity of anyone casting a ballot.
The Special Intensive Revision process got under way in Delhi on 30 June. Registered voters numbered 14.5 million on the rolls at that point. When the draft roll became public on 31 August, close to 4.76 million names had been removed — each entry falling under one of four classifications: absent, shifted, deceased, or duplicate. A separate group of 3.3 million records drew scrutiny over internal inconsistencies in the data.
A deadline of 30 November marks the close of that procedure. Publication of the roster is scheduled for 4 December.
A communication dated 1 October from the Election Commission of India directed electoral officers across every state and Union territory to run a targeted registration push for voters who had yet to enrol or were participating for the first time. Assigned to polling-station staff, the process involves matching the current electoral roll against the version predating the Special Intensive Revision, identifying names that have dropped off, and then visiting those households in person so residents can complete Form 6 — a field effort paced at around 20 to 25 homes per week and expected to run across approximately four weeks.
A special summary revision of electoral rolls — covering 17 states and Union territories — was set in motion by the ECI, marking the first time such an exercise had been undertaken in roughly two years. Of the 17 regions where the SSR has been rolled out, the capital does not feature on that list.
Officials described the procedure as a way to verify that eligible voters were accounted for, with no one left off the rolls. Where a voter of this kind is located, the Booth Level Officer steps in to guide that person through completing Form 6, the document used to restore a name to the electoral rolls. According to their guidelines, Booth Level Officers are directed to call only at the address held in their files, rather than conducting door-to-door searches across a neighbourhood to track down any specific voter.
Spread across Delhi's electoral infrastructure, a workforce of 14,947 booth-level officers operates alongside 902 assistant electoral registration officers, 70 electoral registration officers, and 13 district electoral officers — all functioning in coordination with the chief electoral officer's office — to handle queries and concerns raised by voters.
A Booth Level Officer based in the Okhla area noted that door-to-door visits had been initiated for households where voter registrations were found to be absent from the electoral rolls, adding that roughly half of the approximately 1,000 registered voters in that area were recorded as having relocated. The officer, a teacher employed by MCD, noted that the voter-list verification work had placed considerable demands on daily schedules, with early mornings, school duties, and evening field rounds all falling within a single day, and that many tenants in the area had been found to have relocated to other localities. The officer further noted that households of enrolled voters had been called upon more than once during the canvassing process, yet a portion of those residents had not returned their completed enumeration forms.
Adjusting the timeline helped distribute responsibilities more evenly, and verification of records would proceed under the updated guidelines.
Praveen Shankar Kapoor, a BJP spokesperson based in Delhi, issued a statement on Friday describing the ECI's ruling as one that upholds openness in the process and keeps the door open for voters who meet the eligibility criteria.
