In more than one third of the 70 constituencies in Delhi, the number of deletions during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process has been so high that the draft roll in these 24 seats have been left with fewer electors than the actual number of those who voted in the February 2025 Assembly elections – the most recently held in the Union Territory.

These 24 ACs together had 49.1 lakh voters when Delhi went to polls, of which 28.9 lakh (58.9%) voted. However, the 24 ACs now have only 27.7 lakh voters, which is 1.23 lakh fewer than those who voted in 2025.

The Tughlakabad constituency is where the SIR process has made the deepest cut in these terms. In the draft rolls now, there are only 1,00,386 electors, which is 14,575 fewer than the 1,14,961 voters who turned out to vote in 2025.

If one were to trust that the Election Commission (EC) process has been fair, one should believe in the following astounding possibilities: that everyone who has been deemed to be an “ordinary resident” in these 24 constituencies had voted; a significant chunk who voted are no longer there; those who did not vote during the 2025 polls were not ordinarily resident then or have ceased to be so since the polls. In other words, these constituencies witnessed inward and outward migrations of enormous scale in just the last 17 months between the polls and the commencement of the SIR.

However, with no signs of any of these to have happened. it stands to reason that in merely a year and a half since Assembly elections conducted by the ECI itself, the changes would not be so dramatic that deletions would entail the electorate to reduce to a number lower than the turnout figures.

Since the draft enumeration process involves electors listing their EPIC numbers and their eligibility to vote in the elections, it stretches reason to assume that the recent voters deemed themselves as ineligible.

This is just the draft roll, and there is still time for electors to be added to the lists — both freshly eligible ones and others who have been erroneously deleted from the rolls. But the slapdash nature of the SIR process is evident in the fact that the Union Territory has now been left with only 97.5 lakh electors in the draft roll.

Evidence from elections

In February 2025, Delhi’s electoral rolls had 1.56 crore electors, of which 94.9 lakh electors turned out to vote. This number in the draft rolls follows two stages of culling names — one prior to the SIR when close to 11 lakh electors were deleted and later, the draft SIR phase when nearly 47.6 lakh electors were deleted, as the chart below shows.

The chart below shows  all the 24 constituencies in Delhi which have fewer electors now than the actual turnout in 2025. 

The Tughlakabad constituency is where the SIR process has made the deepest cut in these terms. In the current draft rolls, there are only 1,00,386 electors, which is 14,575 fewer than the 1,14,961 voters who actually turned out to vote in 2025.

This oddity is most pronounced in the eastern, central and southern parts of Delhi; highest especially in seats beyond the Yamuna river on the east. The map here shows those who voted in the 2025 Assembly polls as a share of the number of electors present in the draft SIR rolls released on August 31, 2026. As the map explains, shares exceeding 100% means that more number of people had turned out to vote in 2025 than those who are there in the draft SIR rolls now. 

The number of electors left in the roll — 94.9 lakh — is 97% of the total number of actual voters who turned up to vote in the 2025 elections with just a “buffer” of around 2.6 lakh electors to leave room for those who were ordinary residents, but did not turn out to vote.

In other words, if all the deletions since the Assembly polls are legitimate, based on the draft rolls, now, the hypothetical turnout percentage would be an implausible 97.3%.

Interestingly this pattern of leaving a small “buffer” of electors is more marked for States and UTs who have undergone the SIR in Phase 3 – Andhra Pradesh (8.8%), Karnataka (13.1%), Maharashtra (16.2%) and so on. 

In other words, as the SIR went from phase to phase, the pattern of deletions left fewer “buffer” electors, with Delhi being the “worst” case, as the chart above  shows. 

Published – September 17, 2026 10:46 am IST