Officials said the deletions mainly stem from three reasons: deaths, people moving out of their registered addresses, and duplicate entries.
Ahead of the Assam Assembly elections, the state’s electoral roll has seen a massive clean-up, with over 10.56 lakh voter names removed during a Special Revision exercise carried out by the Election Commission of India.
The updated draft rolls, released on Saturday, show that Assam now has 2.51 crore registered voters, not counting more than 93,000 ‘D-Voters’ — a category reserved for people whose citizenship status remains under question. These voters continue to appear in the draft rolls with the same personal details, but without voting rights.
Officials said the deletions mainly stem from three reasons: deaths, people moving out of their registered addresses, and duplicate entries. Nearly 4.8 lakh names were removed after verification confirmed the voters had passed away, while over 5.23 lakh individuals were found to have shifted elsewhere. Another 53,000-plus entries were flagged and removed due to similarities suggesting duplication.
The revision followed an extensive door-to-door verification drive conducted between November 22 and December 20. Election staff covered over 61 lakh households across the state to check voter details on the ground.
With the draft rolls now out, voters have time to raise objections or seek corrections until January 22. The final electoral rolls are scheduled to be published on February 10.
Assam currently has 31,486 polling stations, following a recent rationalisation process. While several other states going to polls — Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal — are undergoing a Special Intensive Revision, Assam was placed under a Special Revision, which officials say lies between routine annual updates and a full-scale intensive revision.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar earlier noted that Assam follows separate citizenship-related provisions under the law, and that the broader citizenship verification process in the state is nearing completion under the Supreme Court’s supervision.
WHAT IS SIR?
Special Intensive Revision or SIR is an intensive, on-ground exercise that requires verification of all registered voters by booth-level officers (BLOs). The explicit goal of such an exercise is to remove duplicate, deceased, migrated, and “illegal” voters.
The last such intensive revision of electoral rolls in India was undertaken two decades ago.
This year, the SIR exercise in Bihar, conducted just months before the state went to polls, was shrouded by a massive controversy and confusion on the ground. The matter also reached the Supreme Court, which, however, allowed the exercise to progress with modifications.
The opposition has alleged that the SIR exercise was nothing but a smokescreen behind which lakhs of people, from marginalised communities and who, it claimed, traditionally vote for them, were being disenfranchised. The final roll in Bihar saw 68.6 lakh deletions.
