People’s audit in Mangolpuri flags voter-roll discrepancies, seeks public scrutiny of Delhi SIR process

Counterview News 

A people-led audit of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Mangolpuri’s Y-Block has brought renewed scrutiny to the accuracy of Delhi’s draft electoral rolls, with citizen volunteers and civil-society groups reporting cases in which voters allegedly found themselves wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate, or missing altogether from the draft list.

The audit, conducted over more than three weeks under the banner of Jan Sarokar, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and Voter Adhikar Manch, involved house-to-house verification across eight polling booths and covered nearly 10,000 voters using the 2025 Delhi Assembly electoral roll as the baseline. The findings were presented at a four-hour public hearing, or Jan Sunwai, held in Mangolpuri on September 5. The exercise included testimonies from residents, examination of voter records and an assistance camp for people seeking to understand why their names were absent from the draft roll and to file claims and objections.

The organisations said their verification found a significant gap between the 2025 electoral roll and the draft SIR roll in Y-Block. According to the audit, of approximately 9,600 registered voters in the area, around 5,800 appeared in the draft SIR roll, while roughly 2,800 were placed in the ASDD category—Absent, Shifted, Dead or Duplicate—and approximately 1,800 could not be located either in the draft roll or the ASDD list despite appearing in the 2025 voter list. The figures are the organisers’ findings from their local verification and have not been independently audited by the Election Commission of India.

The hearing came amid a much wider reduction in Delhi’s draft electoral roll. The Chief Electoral Officer’s figures show that Delhi had 14,510,299 electors when the SIR process began, while the draft roll published on August 31 contained 9,753,577 names. That leaves 4,756,722 electors outside the draft roll, or roughly 32.8 per cent of the electorate. The Election Commission and Delhi election authorities have said the exercise is intended to update the rolls and remove entries that are duplicate, shifted, deceased or otherwise uncollectable, while providing a claims-and-objections process for eligible voters who have been left out. 

The scale of the exclusions has made Delhi one of the most closely watched cases in the latest phase of SIR. Reporting based on official figures found that the draft roll left out nearly one in three registered electors, while 13 of Delhi’s 70 Assembly constituencies had more than 40 per cent of electors outside the draft roll. The claims and objections period began with publication of the draft on August 31 and is scheduled to run until September 30, while the final electoral roll is scheduled for publication on November 4. 

The Mangolpuri audit focused on what organisers described as the human consequences of such exclusions. One of the cases presented was that of Kanta Prasad, a resident of Y-Block, whose name appeared in the ASDD records with “death” listed as the reason for his exclusion even though he remains alive and lives at the same address. Independent reporting from the September 5 hearing also documented his case, including his presentation of his Aadhaar and voter ID cards to establish his identity and continued residence. 

The organisers said Prasad had previously sought correction of an error in his name but found that the entry was instead deleted. Other testimonies concerned voters who said they had participated in previous elections but could not find their names either in the draft roll or the ASDD records. The audit also recorded cases in which members of the same family received different classifications, with some listed as shifted or absent while others remained on the draft roll. Some residents said they had not received enumeration forms.

These accounts were presented before a jury comprising retired Supreme Court judge Justice Madan Lokur, writer and former Planning Commission member Syeeda Hameed, Safai Karamchari Andolan founder Bezwada Wilson, National Federation of Indian Women leaders Annie Raja and Nisha Siddhu, Mangolpuri government-school principal Rashmi Singh, National Campaign for Construction Workers representative Subhash Bhatnagar, Association for Democratic Reforms representative General Anil Verma and Tara Rao of Edellu Karnataka. Thirty-two testimonies were presented during the hearing, according to the organisers.

General Anil Verma, who heads the Association for Democratic Reforms, was among those highlighting the difficulty that the revision process can create even for long-established voters. “After serving 37 years in the Indian Army, I still received a notice to show documents that would prove my citizenship and protect my right to vote,” he said, according to the organisers.

Annie Raja argued that the issue went beyond individual errors and concerned the relationship between citizenship and electoral participation. “Whatever be our religion and caste, we are all voters and citizens in this country,” she said, adding that the Election Commission’s responsibility was to ensure eligible voters were registered. She described the hearing as an exercise in locating voters who had disappeared from the records and correcting cases where living people had been recorded as dead.

The SIR process itself requires extensive field verification. Delhi’s election authorities deployed more than 13,000 Booth Level Officers for house-to-house enumeration. Officials said BLOs were required to make at least three visits where households could not initially be contacted, and that voters were to receive enumeration forms for verification.  The Election Commission’s stated objective is to ensure that eligible citizens are not left out while ineligible entries are excluded. The Union government, citing the ECI, has also said the process includes supervisory cross-checks, sample audits of deleted entries and opportunities for voters and political parties to scrutinise the draft rolls. 

The Mangolpuri organisers nevertheless questioned whether these safeguards were consistently effective on the ground. They said BLOs attached to the eight booths covered by the audit were invited to the September 5 public hearing but did not attend. The absence of the officials meant that residents’ accounts could not be directly tested during the hearing by the officers responsible for the enumeration process, according to the organisers.

The hearing also focused on the distinction between correcting an existing voter record and treating an excluded elector as a new applicant. The organisers called for people wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate, as well as people missing entirely from the draft and ASDD lists, to have their existing voter records restored through Form 8 rather than being required to apply as new voters through Form 6. Current reporting on the Delhi SIR process indicates, however, that the Delhi CEO’s office has advised electors whose names are missing from the draft to use Form 6 for inclusion during the claims-and-objections period, while Form 8 is used for specified corrections and changes such as shifting residence. 

This difference is significant because the public audit’s demand concerns not merely restoration of voting eligibility but preservation of the voter’s existing record and particulars. The groups argued that an elector who was already registered and was wrongly omitted should not be treated as someone seeking first-time enrolment.

The audit’s other major demand is for the Election Commission to implement the social-audit provisions cited by the organisers from its 2023 Manual on Electoral Rolls. They specifically referred to provisions concerning public reading and scrutiny of draft electoral rolls through Gram Sabha and Ward Committee meetings. The demand is for collective public verification of claims, objections and revisions in both rural and urban areas, including public hearings where residents can identify omissions and seek correction. The cited provisions have also been invoked by civil-society groups in other parts of India calling for public scrutiny of revised electoral rolls. 

Justice Lokur, according to the organisers, emphasised the requirement for repeated household visits before an elector is categorised as uncollectable. He also referred to the Supreme Court’s directions concerning identification documents during the electoral-roll process and said the audit’s findings would be collectively placed before the Election Commission. The stated objective is to secure restoration of eligible voters and establish accountability where erroneous deletions or classifications occurred.

The organisations’ five principal demands were for restoration of all voters wrongly marked absent, shifted, dead or duplicate or omitted from both the draft and ASDD records; correction of existing records rather than treating established voters as new applicants; implementation of the Election Commission’s own provisions on social auditing of electoral rolls; public collective verification of revisions, claims and objections; and regular special camps and public hearings in Mangolpuri Y-Block, with BLOs present and corrections completed within a month.

The audit organisers said the Mangolpuri experience demonstrated that electoral-roll verification need not remain solely an administrative exercise. Door-to-door verification by citizens, public hearings, assistance centres and systematic documentation of disputed entries, they argued, could provide an additional layer of transparency. Social activist Nikhil Dey said the voter list should be regarded as belonging to the people and that citizens should have an opportunity to check their entries, challenge wrongful exclusion and be heard.

The wider Delhi process has already generated a large number of applications for inclusion. The Times of India reported that, five days after the August 31 publication of the draft roll, 2,28,764 Form 6 applications had been received in Delhi, including 23,268 in North West district, which contains Mangolpuri.  The figures indicate that the claims-and-objections stage is likely to be a substantial administrative exercise before the final roll is prepared.

The Election Commission’s position is that the exclusions at the draft stage are not necessarily final deletions. Officials have stressed that voters whose names are absent can submit claims and objections, after which applications are to be examined and valid claims restored before finalisation. The official process therefore distinguishes the draft roll from the final electoral register. 

Jan Sarokar and its partner organisations are seeking to extend the Mangolpuri exercise beyond Delhi, calling on civil-society groups, workers’ organisations, women’s organisations, trade unions, people’s movements, academics, lawyers and citizens to undertake similar “People’s Audits” in their own localities. Their stated aim is to build a nationwide public campaign for electoral rolls that are transparent, participatory and subject to public verification.

The immediate test for the process will be whether voters identified by the Mangolpuri audit and others across Delhi can have their records examined and corrected before the final roll is published on November 4. For now, the competing accounts highlight two aspects of the SIR exercise: the Election Commission’s stated objective of producing an accurate and updated electoral roll, and the concerns raised by residents and civil-society groups that the verification process can itself produce erroneous exclusions. The claims-and-objections period provides the formal mechanism through which those disputed cases will now be considered.