One of India’s largest voter deletion exercises by Election Commission of India (ECI) could be unfolding in its capital. Delhi started with 1.45 crore voters. First, more than 47 lakh names were deleted from the draft electoral roll under the SIR. Now, another 31.6 lakh voters, whose names did make it to the draft list, have been served notices by the ECI, asking them to prove their eligibility.
The names on both lists cut across Delhi’s social spectrum, but the burden of this chaotic and complicated process falls very differently. For the city’s poorest, proving that they belong on the electoral roll can mean tracking down documents and responding to notices, and navigating a process they may barely understand.
The poor, migrants and women have been hit hardest. This is usually put down to paperwork. Poor people lack the right papers. Migrants could not prove where they lived. Women’s documents did not match.
In Delhi, the state did not just fail to find these voters. It helped make them disappear.
First, government agencies demolished their homes. Some families were relocated, others scattered across the city. Then the Election Commission struck their names off the voter rolls, despite its own safeguards against mass deletions.
Delhi’s SIR deleted 47.6 lakh voters. Commission guidelines say booths where deletions exceed two percent are suspicious and must be personally cross-verified. Of Delhi’s 14,947 booths, only 51 stayed within that limit. At 639 booths, more than fifty percent of the voters were deleted.
We mapped the 29 booths where deletions crossed 70 percent. Nine were in neighbourhoods demolished by government agencies. Nearly nine in ten voters across these booths were erased. Several families were living at addresses the government itself had given them. The state knew where they were. The SIR did not find them. Others had moved to rented homes nearby. They were deleted too.
The loss goes beyond votes for Delhi’s poorest residents. Families in slums and jhuggi-jhopri clusters often need their electoral history to prove how long they lived at a demolished address. That proof can decide whether they qualify for rehabilitation or other state benefits. Registering again may bring back their names to the rolls, but not that history.
The same demolition can take away a home, a vote and the paper trail to claim one in future.
Read our full investigation here:
The Reporters’ Collective is tracking SIR’s fallout beyond the voter list, into welfare schemes, ration cards and citizenship. This reporting runs only on reader generosity. If you believe this work matters, support and donate to us.
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