India, Sept. 22 -- If a third of all voters in a region's draft roll receive notices as part of the special intensive revision (SIR), it is alarming indeed. This is exactly what has happened in Delhi where of the 9,753,577 electors whose names were published in the Capital's draft electoral rolls, 1,379,785 were placed in the "no mapping" category and 1,933,134 were tagged as bearing "logical discrepancies". This follows the first phase of the controversial exercise, which already shaved a third of the Capital's pre-SIR voter roll. Among the people for whom notices were generated were Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta, former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, former deputy prime minister LK Advani, external affairs minister S Jaishankar, and election commissioner SS Sandhu, underlining the widespread nature of the discrepancies flagged by the Election Commission of India (ECI)'s controversial software which had previously faced criticism in West Bengal as well. This newspaper reported on Monday that booth-level officials will facilitate the process and collect the documents of "prominent electors". It is clear that the so-called non-prominent citizens will not be as lucky. Those millions of common people will have to forgo other work, spend hours at a facilitation centre or with their booth-level officers, trying to convince the authorities that an extra alphabet in their name or a typo in their date of birth - commonplace errors in India, made by officials while entering data - doesn't extinguish their identity. The scale of the chaos in a small province such as Delhi should prompt ECI to retool the system and make it easier for citizens. Given the migration patterns in a sprawling urban centre such as Delhi, exclusions from the voter roll can be high. This newspaper has also noted that people often enroll themselves both at their places of birth and work, thereby resulting in duplication that the SIR can remove. But the pursuit of statistical purity shouldn't burden ordinary people, whose zeal to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy....