The draft electoral rolls released after the completion of the enumeration phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Karnataka on Monday (August 24, 2026) has revealed alarming levels of deletions, unprecedented when compared with other major States that saw high deletions during the enumeration phase.
With the deletion of 1.08 crore names from the rolls, the State, with 224 Assembly Constituencies (ACs), saw its electoral rolls shrinking by 19.5% from 5.54 crore to 4.46 crore — which is the removal of roughly one in every five voters who were there on the rolls before the SIR.
Though this was not the highest rate of deletions among major States during the enumeration phase with Telangana recently reporting 21.7% deletions, constituency-wise analyses show more worrying patterns in Karnataka.
The Election Commission of India (EC) has not released the electors to population in the 18+ age group (EP) ratio for any States during the SIR, which is mandatory during every electoral roll revision. The EP ratio gives an indication of under-enrolment or over-enrolment. While the EC has cited absence of Census data as the reason for not releasing EP ratio, many have raised concerns that the SIR is being undertaken with no estimation of the number of voters who should be there on the rolls.
The table below compares the population eligible to vote — taken from the report of the Union government’s Technical Group on Population Projections — with electors before and after the SIR in major States. Karnataka’s draft SIR roll is at least 67 lakh short of the estimated population eligible to vote. It is uncertain if this gap could be bridged to at least a reasonable extent, considering that roughly 44 lakh voters who are in the draft rolls are likely to be served notices for discrepancies.
The map shows where the deletions are concentrated. The core Bengaluru region saw the highest concentration of deletions. Outside the Bengaluru region, Gulbarga Dakshin saw the highest of 34% deletions. Its pre-SIR electorate of 2,97,785 voters dropped to 1,96,522 with more than one lakh voters in the rolls getting deleted.
The deletions seen in and around Bengaluru is unprecedented when compared with deletions seen in the highly urbanised capital cities of other States that have completed the SIR exercise.
Five constituencies — Bommanahalli (54.8%), Dasarahalli (52.1%), B.T.M Layout (51.6%), Vijayanagar (51.1%), and C.V. Raman Nagar (51.1%) — saw more than half of their electoral rolls getting culled. This is perhaps the first time in any of the major States where ACs have seen more than 50% deletions during the enumeration phase. Fifty per cent of the 1.08 crore deletions came from just 36 of the 224 ACs, of which 28 were in the core Bengaluru area.
Deletions were concentrated in most urban constituencies, in line with the pattern seen in other States. Twenty nine highly urbanised districts saw 41.5% deletions. However, what stands out in Karnataka, was the high share of voters getting deleted with ‘Shifted’ or ‘Absent’ as the reasons, even in highly rural areas, as the table below shows. Those marked as ‘Deceased’ accounted for only 15.2% of the total deletions. In contrast, 27.6% of over 97 lakh deletions in Tamil Nadu — with the size of its electorate are comparable with Karnataka — were marked as ‘Deceased’ during the enumeration of its SIR in December 2025.
Lack of transparency
Despite such high deletions, Karnataka, worryingly, appears to be the least transparent. The website of the Chief Electoral Officer has not hosted the list of deleted voters in a searchable format as done in all other States.
Instead, the lists were hosted in different Google drive links with the booth-wise list of deletions available only in English. The documents do not carry old booth numbers, which make it difficult for voters to search them since the booth numbers have changed for a large number of polling stations due to the booth rationalisation exercise carried out during the enumeration phase.
Karnataka CEO V. Anbu Kumar told The Hindu that the office is in the process of adding the old booth numbers. When asked about the poor maintenance of the website, with many of the links throwing “URL not found” errors, the CEO’s office said it would look into the issue.
Meanwhile, unlike most other States where gender-wise details of electors in the draft SIR rolls and in the deletions were made available, Karnataka has not released has not made the gender-wise data on deletions public, leaving it unclear how many women, men or transgender persons have been left out. The CEO said the office did not have the data.
Note: To classify Karnataka’s 234 constituencies, The Hindu’s Data team used night-time light intensity from the Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Platform for India (SHRUG) database maintained by Development Data Lab, drawn from satellite readings from the year 2023.
Based on this data, The Hindu, for each constituency calculated average brightness across its area. The values were first converted to a logarithmic scale, then grouped using Jenks Natural Breaks — a standard mapping technique that finds the cut-off points where the data separate most naturally — into “Highly Urban”, “Moderately Urban”, “Moderately Rural” and “Highly Rural”.
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