Delhi election office says 20 lakh of 33 lakh flagged voter entries are resolved

The claim

On October 12, the office of Delhi's Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) said that about 20 lakh of roughly 33 lakh voter entries flagged during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll had been resolved. According to an IANS report carried by Nagaland Post, CEO R. Alice Vaz said the 33 lakh entries had been flagged under the logical discrepancy or unmapped categories. The office also said no eligible voter would be excluded from the list, according to Haribhoomi, which cited a post by the office on X.

What the reports show

Three reports agree on the headline numbers, and all of them trace the numbers to the CEO's office: about 33 lakh flagged, about 20 lakh resolved. Mathrubhumi, in a report dated October 13, describes the 33 lakh as voters who received notices over mismatches in details such as names and ages, or because their records could not be linked to the 2002 electoral rolls. IANS describes the same 33 lakh as entries rather than voters. The reports do not say whether the two counts are identical.

Mathrubhumi adds that a notice does not automatically mean a name has been deleted. It separately reports that more than 47 lakh names have been removed from the draft rolls as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate, and it treats that as a different process from the notices.

The IANS report says Delhi voters can seek help from 14,947 booth-level officers, 902 assistant electoral registration officers, 70 electoral registration officers and 13 district election officers. It describes similar outreach drives in other states that the Election Commission of India (ECI) had pushed its state officers to run. Haribhoomi reports that the Election Commission described its campaign as a response to objections from opposition parties, without naming the parties or their claims.

What the record does not settle

None of the three reports defines what "resolved" means. Haribhoomi notes that the CEO's message does not say how many of the 20 lakh entries were corrected and how many were removed, or what happened to the voters concerned, and it does not account for the remaining 13 lakh or so cases. Mathrubhumi makes a related point: resolving about 20 lakh notices does not by itself show how many voters have been confirmed, restored or removed. The reports read include no figure or audit from outside the CEO's office.

The assurance that no eligible voter will be excluded concerns the final outcome. Mathrubhumi notes that the final roll will show which eligible voters are included after verification and claims.

Dates ahead

According to Mathrubhumi, the Delhi rolls for the 70 Assembly constituencies were published on August 31, and 2,17,391 people have applied to register as voters since then. Special camps with booth-level officers are set for October 18 and 25. Claims and objections close on October 30, officials are to dispose of submissions by November 30, and the final roll is due on December 4.