SIR: “Migration, logical fallacies likely to wipe out 12% voters in Karnataka”

With numerous irregularities emerging during the pre-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) mapping, political groups and activists monitoring the exercise who checked the records with Booth Level Officers (BLOs) estimated that around 12% of Karnataka’s electorate could face deletion during the revision process.

The estimate is based on revised documents as well as trends observed in other states where the exercise was conducted, Jagrutha Karnataka members said. The national average attrition rate was around 10-12%, with Kerala being a notable exception.

Pre-SIR exercise in Karnataka

Total Voters: 5.54 million

Voters mapped by June 11: 5 million

Voters not yet mapped: 54.08 lakh

State mapping percentage (excluding GBA): 94.01%

Percentage mapping within GBA: 73.91%

Electoral lists will also be frozen soon. The Election Commission will freeze the E-Roll, the digital version of the official voter list, on June 16. Before the freeze comes into effect, all pending applications in Forms 6, 6A, 7 and 8 will be processed. These forms are used for enrollment of new voters, registration of non-resident voters (NRIs), objections to enrollment in the electoral roll and correction or updating of voter details. Once the list is frozen, it will serve as the base voter database for the next phase of the revision exercise.

While permanently shifted voter IDs are expected to account for a significant portion of the erasures, activists say the exercise has also highlighted difficulties in mapping female voters whose details have changed after marriage. This problem is particularly evident for women who have moved to or from neighboring states such as Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where linking records between places has proven difficult.

Concerns were also raised over the “logical inconsistencies” category. Citing the example of West Bengal, where more voters were allegedly deleted in the logical discrepancy category than in the absent, shifted, dead and duplicate/deleted (ASDD) category, the association argued that the category could lead to arbitrary scrutiny. He stated that there is no clear definition of what constitutes a logical contradiction, allowing the category to be widely interpreted and extended to cover a wide range of cases.

The association further said that in one recent case in Tumakuru district, the BLO allegedly connected 138 women with their in-laws, completing a large amount of mapping in a short span of time. Similar cases were also reported in Bengaluru.

However, father-in-law is not among the prescribed options for such mapping. The association argued that such cases, along with cases where voters fail to produce documents or where names and spellings vary across records, are likely to attract scrutiny for logical inconsistencies during the verification process.

Under the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA), Chief Commissioner and District Electoral Officer M. Maheshwar Rao recently said that 28% voters could not be mapped during the exercise. While clarifying that failure to map does not automatically lead to deletion, he said these voters will have to produce documents to prove their identity.

Members of Jagrutha Karnataka said the problem goes beyond duplicate records. Given the scale of migration over the last three decades, they said many people, especially migrant workers from many districts, especially north Karnataka, either lack the required documents or have different names and spellings in different records, complicating mapping.

In many cases, BLOs said that when they sought clarification from officials regarding cases where voters were not mapped to the 2002 rolls or their parents in cases of descendant mapping, they were advised to refer to instructional videos and complete the exercise.

However, Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka, V. Anbu Kumar dismissed the concerns, saying that no such estimate could be made until the draft electoral roll was released.

Published – 12 Jun 2026 0:48 IST