New Delhi, Sept. 2 -- Nearly one in every three electors in Delhi has not made it to the draft electoral roll prepared after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), putting the spotlight on the election machinery's ability to handle what could become a substantial volume of claims and objections before the final roll is published.
Delhi had around 1.45 crore electors when the SIR exercise began. After the house-to-house enumeration, the draft roll published on August 31 contains around 97.5 lakh names, leaving 47.5 lakh electors outside the draft, nearly 33 per cent of the earlier electorate.
The Election Commission has categorised the missing entries under reasons including absent, permanently shifted, deceased, duplicate and other cases. The largest group comprises around 43.3 lakh electors marked absent or shifted, while around 2.8 lakh were reported deceased and 1.4 lakh identified as duplicate or multiple entries.
However, not appearing in the draft roll does not by itself mean that an elector has permanently lost the right to vote. Eligible voters can seek inclusion during the claims and objections period.
The scale of the exercise raises a key logistical question of how much workload could the election machinery face if a significant share of those missing from the draft approaches the authorities?
Even if just 10 per cent of the 47.5 lakh electors seek inclusion, the system would have to process about 4.8 lakh claims, averaging nearly 16,000 a day over the 30-day claims period. If the response reaches 25 per cent, the figure would rise to about 11.9 lakh claims, or nearly 40,000 a day. At a 50 per cent response, the potential volume would be around 23.8 lakh claims.
The workload is also unlikely to be evenly distributed across Delhi's 70 Assembly constituencies. Several constituencies have more than 40 per cent of their existing electors outside the draft roll. Tughlakabad has the highest proportion at about 48 per cent, followed by Okhla at around 45 per cent, indicating that some areas could face a substantially heavier claims burden than others.
The first indications of the response are already emerging. By September 2, around 2.18 lakh Form 6 applications had been received cumulatively, including 3,605 on September 1, according to the Delhi CEO's bulletin. Form 6 is used by eligible voters seeking inclusion in the electoral roll.
The claims and objections window will remain open until September 30, while the process of issuing notices, conducting hearings and disposing of claims is scheduled to continue until October 29. The final electoral roll is due to be published on November 4.
The Election Commission has maintained that the exercise is intended to ensure that no eligible citizen is left out while preventing ineligible names from entering the electoral roll.
The coming weeks will therefore test the administrative capacity of Delhi's election machinery.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.