The Election Commission of India (ECI) published its integrated draft electoral, revealing that a staggering 97.3 lakh names were deleted in Tamil Nadu and 73.7 lakh in Gujarat.
These deletions were carried out under Phase 2 of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a large-scale door-to-door verification exercise aimed at sanitising voter lists ahead of the 2026 elections. In Tamil Nadu, the electorate shrank by 15 per cent, falling from 6.41 crore in October to 5.43 crore, while Gujarat saw a 14.5 per cent reduction, with its voter base declining from 5.08 crore to 4.34 crore.
The primary reasons for these removals include deceased electors, permanent migrations, and duplicate entries. In Tamil Nadu, officials identified 26.9 lakh deceased voters and 66.4 lakh who had shifted or were absent, while Chennai alone saw a record 35.6 per cent of its names removed. Gujarat’s data showed that 40.2 lakh voters had permanently migrated, while 18.1 lakh were deceased. Beyond the deletions, the ECI has issued notices to an additional 1.2 crore electors in each state to address “logical discrepancies,” such as age inconsistencies or mismatches in parental details, which require documentary proof to resolve.
This intensive cleansing exercise is historic in its scale, although the ECI has performed similar revisions thirteen times since 1952, with the last major “Special Intensive Revision” occurring over twenty years ago in 2002–2004. Historically, such drives are triggered when electoral rolls are suspected of becoming “bloated” or disconnected from actual population data. For instance, earlier in 2025, a similar drive in Bihar resulted in 68 lakh deletions.
Analysts note that while routine annual updates are standard, the current 2025–2026 cycle is uniquely rigorous, involving more than five lakh Booth Level Officers (BLOs) cross-mapping data against the 2002 legacy records to eliminate ghost voters created by decades of rapid urbanisation and unreported deaths.
The scale of these revisions has sparked intense political debate, particularly in poll-bound Tamil Nadu. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has expressed "shock" at the unprecedented numbers, alleging that such mass deletions could lead to the disenfranchisement of genuine voters.
Conversely, the ECI maintains that the process followed three rounds of physical verification to ensure the integrity of the democratic process.