Booth level officers check voter lists at sir help desk organized by nadama thekkumbhagam village at palace school, Tripunithura, Kerala on November 15, 2025. | Photo credit: Thulasi Kakkat
As the second phase of the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls begins, it is not clear how the Election Commission of India (ECI) plans to use the “preliminary mapping” that each state conducts before launching the mammoth project.
The pre-mapping exercise involved comparing in advance the voters who were already present on the voter lists after the previous SIR with those who are on the current list.
In most states, the last SIR was conducted between 2002 and 2004, and the current lists are those available from October 2025.
In the second phase, SIR is being conducted in 12 states and Union Territories, including poll-bound Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal. The first phase was carried out in Bihar, resulting in the deletion of nearly 69 million names.
The ECI, in a meeting with Chief Electoral Officers of all states held in the capital before the introduction of SIR, reviewed the mapping already done by various states.
Officials at the poll body said that the BLOs will already have this list (voters in the last SIR) and this would ensure that around 60-70% of voters would already be covered by the time the SIR process begins.
Challenges on the ground
However, things seem to be different on the ground, with a number of officials from the offices of the state CEOs as well as booth level officers saying that the voters themselves are to fill the form with the names given in the latest SIR and only in cases where they were unable to find their names, the BLOs would help them with the ‘pre-mapping’ data.
“If voters are unable to find their 2002 details online, the matching will enable BLOs to inform them whether their names were available in the 2002 list. Voters can then enter these details in the form,” a senior official in the Kerala CEO’s office told The Hindu.
He claimed that Kerala could have mapped 68% of the voters on the 2002 roll with the 2025 roll and said this indicated that the BLOs compared the 2002 Kerala SIR voter roll with the 2025 voter rolls and identified a 68% match. “In other words, they have confirmed that a significant number of voters from the 2002 roll are already on the 2025 roll.”
For example, Kerala had 2.24 million voters in 2002 SIR, while the 2025 electoral roll has 2.78 million voters. The BLOs found that 1.7 million voters from the 2002 list continue to appear on the 2025 list. A large proportion of the remaining voters on the 2025 list are likely to be children of those listed in 2002 who were under 18 at the time, the official said.
Similarly, an official of the Madhya Pradesh CEO’s office said that it is the voters who have to fill in the latest SIR details in their enumeration forms and the BLOs would “verify” the same before digitizing the information using “pre-mapping” data.
However, the BLO of Uttar Pradesh said it was not aware of any preliminary mapping and that this could have been because its stand consisted mostly of housing societies, which did not exist in 2003.
Meanwhile, voters looking for their names in the SIR 2002-04 lists (released online by the EC) across the country are facing some difficulty in finding their names as many polling stations and in some cases even assembly segments have changed.
The PDF lists are in a searchable format, but mostly in the regional languages of the state, making the search process cumbersome.
On Saturday (November 15, 2025), the ECI said that more than 95% of the census forms have been distributed across the states. The house to house enumeration process will be conducted from November 4 to December 4 and the Draft Rolls will be published on December 9.
Published – 15 Nov 2025 21:10 IST
