Online-offline gap in Delhi leaves out voters in SIR

Booth level officers (BLOs), electoral registration officers (EROs), and political workers attribute this phenomenon to a misunderstanding of the process.

“We did everything by the book,” said 31-year-old Lokesh Kumar, a resident of Jangpura in south-east Delhi, as he tried to make sense of why his name, along with those of three other family members, was missing from Delhi’s draft special intensive revision (SIR) roll released earlier this week. They filled the enumeration forms online via the Election Commission’s (EC’s) portal or the ECINET app, expecting a routine update to their voter roll records. And yet, when the draft electoral roll was published on Monday, their names were missing.

Their experience is mirrored in neighbourhoods across the Capital.

Also Read: Automated system flags ‘unusual’ age gaps, family links in Delhi SIR

HT spoke to dozens of people from Badarpur, Trilokpuri, Mangolpuri, and other constituencies who said they submitted their enumeration forms online, but were left off the rolls. Badarpur, Trilokpuri and Mangolpuri recorded deletions of 42.67%, 33%, and 21.2%, respectively.

Lokesh got his voter ID at 19. “I make it a point to vote each time. I first voted in the 2015 Delhi assembly elections, then in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and the 2025 assembly elections as well. I couldn’t vote in 2020 due to a health emergency. Finding my name missing from the list was shocking,” he said.

Booth level officers (BLOs), electoral registration officers (EROs), and political workers attribute this phenomenon to a misunderstanding of the process.

Anish Kumar Jha, a BLO in Jangpura, said, “Many people think that the online process ends with form submission and then don’t bother reaching out to the BLOs. When a form is submitted online, it is not automatically added to the roll. A BLO still needs to verify the submission via a phone call or a physical visit.”

For this process, a BLO needs to call the number linked with the online application. In several cases, this number does not match the one linked to the voter’s Aadhaar or existing voter ID, leading to what officers call a “technical mismatch”.

“Once we figure out that the number used to fill the form does not match the one linked with Aadhaar or voter ID, we are supposed to reject the form and tell the voter to re-register when the correction window opens later,” he added.

Lokesh and his family, however, were not informed that their forms had been rejected.

An ERO from the area explained, “BLOs usually don’t understand which category to place these voters under. Unreturned online forms cannot be shifted into the Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate (ASDD) category which is meant for those who never responded at all. Others place them into the ‘enumeration form not returned’ category. This means they’re dropped from the roll altogether.”

On Monday, EC published the draft electoral roll for Delhi, dropping nearly 4.76 million or 32.8% names – marking the deletion of more male names than women and the highest proportion of removal at the draft roll stage among 30 states and Union territories. Men accounted for 57.2% of the deletions and women 42.8%.

Political workers going door-to-door with copies of the draft roll say the pattern is widespread.

Parvinder Singh, an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader from Badli in outer Delhi says they’re working expeditiously to address voters’ issues.

“We’ve received several complaints about BLOs not doing door-to-door visits. There were also discrepancies in verifying online forms. My children filled their forms online and have been excluded from the list,” he said.

Shubham Sharma, a Congress representative to EC from Tughlakabad, which recorded the lowest form-digitisation rate of any Delhi constituency during SIR, was more critical of the BLOs’ conduct. “Forget visiting thrice, as mandated, in some cases BLOs didn’t even visit once. Those who submitted forms online did not get any verification calls,” he said.

In Mangolpuri, 38-year-old Kusum Singh alleged she was marked dead despite submitting her form. “Is this some kind of a joke? I submitted the form, did everything in time, and yet when the list came, I was marked dead. I will now submit an appeal.”

Others in the area alleged they either submitted their forms online or that the BLOs never came to collect them. “This has been my home for 47 years. I was born here,” said Anirudh Singh, also a resident of Mangolpuri, who was marked under the ‘permanently shifted’ category. “I never received a notice.”