SIR to begin in 12 states, UTs; electoral rolls to be frozen tonight: Election Commission

New Delhi: After a highly successful voter verification process, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive will be undertaken in 12 states/Union Territories (UT)s and the electoral rolls of those respective provinces will be locked tonight, said the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar on Monday.

Briefing the media about the impending voter list revision exercise, the CEC congratulated the polling officials as well as electors for a successful SIR in Bihar and explained in detail the procedure and rationale of undertaking the ‘purification drive’, from time to time.

The CEC said that since Independence, the SIR has been undertaken in the country as many as 8 times, between 1951 to 2004 and the last one took place in 2004. He added that political parties have been repeatedly urging it to conduct voter verification to ensure only legitimate voters participate in the electoral process.

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He said that it is essential to clean the electoral rolls after every few years because of reasons like voter duplication, removal of names of those who have either passed away or have permanently shifted out of the poll-bound state.

Explaining the nitty-gritty of the SIR exercise, the CEC said that the enumeration forms will be printed for those states where this will be undertaken and voters’ list of those states will be frozen on Monday night.

Hinting at a pan-India SIR rollout, he said that it was first undertaken in Bihar and will soon be rolled out in other states.

Usually, 1 polling station comprises 1,000 voters. In 1 Assembly, there are 300-400 polling stations, under the supervision of 1 Electoral Registration Officer (ERO). It is under the ERO’s guidance that the BLOs work and electoral rolls are prepared and later queried upon.

Further, breaking down the procedure, he informed that the BLOs will first distribute the enumeration forms to electors, enabling them to verify their details on their own via ‘digital linking’ to previous records.

“If there has been no change since 2003, no linking with old EPIC cards needs to be done but those who don’t have names linked to prior records, they will need to submit any of the documents as sought by the poll panel,” he said.

“BLOs will visit every house, three times,” he informed.

Draft and final voter list will be published by EROs and Deputy EROs as it is incumbent upon them to publish error-free electoral rolls.

The CEC also appealed to the 6 national parties to appoint their respective BLOs and said that the Chief Electoral Officers, District Electoral Officers (DROs) and EROs have been asked to hold detailed dialogue with political parties, explaining to them in detail about the ‘purging’ exercise.