Tamil Nadu SIR: 97 Lakh Voters Deleted in First Draft, 14.25 lakh From Chennai Alone

On Friday (19th December), Election Commission of India (ECI) published the integrated draft of the election rolls after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in the state.

According to the District Election Commission’s latest audit, the draft electoral rolls have been streamlined by removing roughly 97 lakh ineligible entries. The bulk of these removals consisted of voters who had moved (6.6 million) or passed away (2.6 million), with an additional 3.3 lakh eliminated due to duplicate registrations across different locations.

Following the current revision, the total number of eligible voters in the have gone down from  6.41 crore to 5.43 crore voters, which includes 2.66 crore men, 2.77 crore women and 7,191 transgender voters.

The constituency of Chennai especially saw a major overhaul with a total of  14.25 lakh voters being removed from the electoral rolls. The reasons cited included 1.56 lakh deaths, 27,323 voters not found at the listed address, 12.22 lakh voters reported as shifted, and 18,772 cases of dual voting.

Tamil Nadu Chief Election Officer Archana Patnaik, in an interaction with the media, also revealed that Sholinganallur and Pallavaram constituencies in Chennai had the most numbers of voter deletion from the rolls in the entire state. Some of the other notable constituencies that also witnessed a big drop in the numbers include Coimbatore with 6.50 lakh deletions, Dindigul with 2.34 lakh deletions, Karur, with 79,690 deletions, and  Kanchipuram with 2.74 lakh deletions.

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