SIR: Over 61,000 marked ‘ineligible’; foreign citizen count remains undetermined

Of more than 43.82 lakh notices generated during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) due to logical discrepancy and no mapping, at least 1,88,324 names were deleted from Karnataka’s final electoral roll, with nearly 61,900 voters declared “ineligible” following hearings on notices by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs), Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) V. Anbu Kumar said on Tuesday (October 27), explaining the reasons for deletions from the final roll. 

Hearings were conducted for all the cases, and while 43,20,957 names were retained for the final roll, another 61,867 were marked as ineligible, Mr. Kumar said, adding that these forms were generated for those found ineligible during the hearings on various grounds, including acquiring foreign citizenship and being unreachable during the notice hearings, among other reasons. 

Besides these, 1,24,327 Form 7 applications were auto-generated when voters applied for a change of residence through Form 8, to update their names from their previous addresses. After the draft roll was published, another 1,091 voters were identified as dead, while 184 names were deleted after the voters were marked absent during the notice phase. 

Foreign nationals

However, despite identifying foreign nationals as being one of the stated aims of the country-wide SIR, conducted in phases to “protect the sanctity” of electoral rolls, the CEO’s office has not provided a concrete figure on how many foreign citizens were identified during the exercise, even as the revision has concluded. 

Mr. Kumar said the number of foreign citizens identified was “less than a thousand”, adding that the process of identifying them was still under way. He did not provide an exact count. 

From ASDDO to ASDD

Another change in the final roll is the merger of the ‘Others’ category with the ‘Absent’ category. Karnataka, unlike other SIR States, had so far classified deletions under the ASDDO categories — Absent, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead and Others — with 3,83,884 names falling under ‘Others’. 

The CEO’s office had earlier said that the ‘Others’ category included people who refused to sign the enumeration forms, but had not provided a categorical explanation of the category. In contrast, the ‘Absent’ category was meant for electors who could not be reached during the enumeration phase or could not get the enumeration form itself. With the merger, the number of names marked ‘Absent’ has increased to 19,00,926 from over 15 lakh in the draft roll, including the 3,83,884 names earlier classified under ‘Others’.