Booth Level Officers check voters lists at a SIR help desk organised by the Nadama Thekkumbhagam village office at Palace School, Tripunithura, Kerala, on November 15, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Thulasi Kakkat
As the second phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls gets under way, it is unclear how the Election Commission of India (ECI) plans to use the “pre-mapping” exercise done by each State before the rollout of the gigantic project.
The pre-mapping exercise entailed matching in advance electors who were already present in the voter lists after the previous SIR with those in the current list.
In most States, the last SIR was conducted between 2002 and 2004, and the current lists are the ones which are available as of October 2025.
In the second phase, SIR is being conducted across 12 States and Union Territories, including poll-bound Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and West Bengal. The first phase was done in Bihar, which led to the deletion of nearly 69 lakh names.
The ECI had — at a meeting with the Chief Electoral Officers of all States, held in the national capital before the rollout of the SIR — assessed the mapping already been done by various States.
Officials in the poll body had said that BLOs would already have this list (voters in the last SIR), and this would ensure that around 60-70% voters would already be covered by the time the SIR process begins.
Challenges on the ground
However, things seem to be working out differently on the ground, with a host of officials from State CEO offices as well as Booth Level Officers saying that voters are themselves supposed to fill the Enumeration Forms with details of names figured in the last SIR, and only in cases where they were unable to find their names, the BLOs would assist them with data from the “pre-mapping”.
“If voters are unable to locate their 2002 details online, the matching exercise will enable BLOs to inform them whether their names were available in the 2002 list. These details can then be entered by the voters in the form,” a senior official in the Kerala CEO office told The Hindu.
Asserting that Kerala could map 68% of voters in the 2002 list with the 2025 list, he said this indicates that the BLOs have compared the 2002 Kerala SIR voters list with the 2025 electoral rolls and have identified a 68% match. “In other words, they have confirmed that a significant number of voters from the 2002 list are already present in the 2025 list”.
For example, Kerala had 2.24 crore voters in the 2002 SIR, while the 2025 electoral roll has 2.78 crore voters. The BLOs have found that 1.7 crore voters from the 2002 list continue to appear in the 2025 roll. A large share of the remaining voters in the 2025 list are likely to be the children of those listed in 2002, who were below 18 years of age at that time, the official said.
Similarly, an official of the Madhya Pradesh CEO office said that it is the voters who have to fill out the details of the last SIR in their Enumeration Forms, and the BLOs would “verify” the same before digitising the information using the “pre-mapping” data.
A BLO from Uttar Pradesh, however, said she was not aware of any pre-mapping exercise, and that it could be because her booth comprised of majorly housing societies that did not exist during 2003.
Meanwhile, electors who are looking up their names in the 2002-04 SIR lists (put up online by the EC) across the country are having some difficulty finding their names, as many polling booths and, in some cases, even Assembly segments have changed.
The PDF lists are in searchable format, but are mostly in the regional languages of the State, making the search process cumbersome.
On Saturday (November 15, 2025), the ECI said that over 95% of Enumeration Forms have been distributed across the States. The house-to-house enumeration process will take place from November 4 to December 4, and the Draft Rolls will be published on December 9.
Published – November 15, 2025 09:10 pm IST
