SIR explained: Why the voter role revision has become so controversial

Since it began in June 2025, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that the exercise could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes.

On Wednesday, The Indian Express reported that some of the concerns about the conduct of the exercise had also come from within the Election Commission.

Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally objected at least 14 times in the past 10 months to decisions related to the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge, the newspaper reported.

Unlike with the previous updates to the electoral rolls, to be included in the revised lists this time, voters need to show that they or their parents are present on the 2002 voter lists. That was when the last SIR was conducted.

At that time, the poll panel had taken double the time to revise the lists.

The Election Commission has been serving notices to crores of persons to explain “logical discrepancies” for them to be retained in the electoral rolls. Logical discrepancies refer to what the panel considers inconsistencies such as a mismatch with the spellings of names of the voters’ parents, what it considers an unreasonably low gap between the ages of...

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