Andhra Pradesh’s electoral rolls just got a lot leaner. The Election Commission of India released a draft voter list on Friday, July 31, showing close to 45 lakh names struck off following a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise carried out across the state.
Where the deletions came from
The numbers, released by Chief Electoral Officer Vivek Yadav, break down into a few clear categories. Roughly 22.3 lakh voters were removed because they had permanently relocated or simply couldn’t be located during the exercise. Another 15.22 lakh names belonged to voters who have since died. A further 7.37 lakh were flagged because the same person turned up registered at more than one address — duplicates that inflate the rolls without adding real voters.
On top of that, close to 44.9 lakh electors didn’t make the cut for a mix of reasons: Booth Level Officers couldn’t track them down, some had since become voters in other states or union territories, some never returned their enumeration forms by the July 24 deadline, and others simply chose not to re-register.
Why this happened
The SIR drive ran across Andhra Pradesh from June 15 to July 24, with Booth Level Officers going door to door to verify every entry on the rolls. By the July 24 cutoff, the CEO’s office says enumeration forms had been collected from 3.71 crore of the state’s 4.16 crore registered electors — a turnout the CEO’s office is calling strong participation for this phase.
Behind the exercise stood a sizeable machinery: all 28 District Election Officers, 175 Electoral Registration Officers covering every Assembly Constituency, over a thousand Assistant EROs, thousands of BLO supervisors, and more than 46,000 Booth Level Officers stationed at polling booths across the state. Political parties were also visibly present — the number of Booth Level Agents they deployed nearly doubled compared to when the exercise began.
If your name is missing, here’s what to do
This isn’t the final word. The list published on Friday is a draft, and there’s a window to fix it. Anyone who believes they were wrongly dropped can file a claim using Form-6, along with the required declaration, between July 31 and August 30. Objections will be processed through September 28, and the final, updated electoral roll is due out on October 3.
For anyone unsure whether their name survived the cut, the booth-wise lists of removed voters — sorted by reason, whether absence, relocation, death, or duplication — have been posted at local Election Registration Officer offices, panchayat and municipal notice boards, polling stations, and on the CEO’s official website.
The bigger picture
Large-scale roll revisions like this tend to spark debate over accuracy and disenfranchisement, especially when the numbers run into the lakhs. With the claims-and-objections window now open, the real test will be how many of the nearly 45 lakh removed voters come forward to reclaim their place on the rolls before the October deadline.
