What the Anti-SIR Alliance’s investigation found on the ground
The SIR Investigation Report – A Narrative of Betrayal and Tears, released by the Anti-SIR Alliance and Citizens’ Vote Protection Committee, examines the implementation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Karnataka. The report is based on voter-roll data, a survey of Booth Level Officers (BLOs), testimonies from affected voters and a continuing ground-level inquiry across 100 polling booths in 25 districts. It is based on voter-roll data, field investigations, and testimonies from voters and Booth Level Officers, the report examines large-scale deletions, notices issued to voters, and the difficulties faced by marginalised communities in retaining their names on the electoral roll. The investigation raises important questions about the accuracy, transparency and accessibility of the SIR process and its implications for the right to vote in Karnataka.
The report is sharply critical of the way the SIR was conducted. It argues that the process placed an extraordinary burden on voters to establish their electoral eligibility and that errors in enumeration and voter mapping resulted in large numbers of genuine voters being left out of the draft electoral roll. Its central concern is that the burden of correcting these errors has been transferred from the electoral administration to individual citizens.
The findings are striking in Karnataka, where the report says 1.08 crore names were excluded from the draft electoral roll under the categories Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Others (ASDDO). It also records the unusually large number of deletions in Bengaluru and the disproportionate impact reported in areas with substantial Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, nomadic and other economically marginalised populations.
The report’s conclusions and allegations are those of the Anti-SIR Alliance and Citizens’ Vote Protection Committee. They should therefore be read as an investigation and critique by a civil-society coalition, rather than as an independent adjudication of every allegation.
How the SIR process unfolded in Karnataka
Given the Bihar 2025 SIR experience, followed by the mass scale exclusions in West Bengal, some groups in Karnataka were preparing for the SIR process to commence in Karnataka. The Anti-SIR Alliance says it organised more than 25 conferences across Karnataka between November 2025 and February 2026 and subsequently brought together progressive organisations and secular political parties under a common platform. Its stated objective was to prevent SIR from being implemented, while also preparing to assist voters if the process went ahead.
The report states that adequate public preparation by the State Election Commission (SEC) did not take place once SIR was announced. It says voters were not sufficiently informed about the procedure, the enumeration form, the mapping process, required documents or the significance of the previous electoral roll.
This was especially serious, according to the report, for rural communities, migrant workers, Adivasis, nomadic communities and others with limited access to digital information. Although the Election Commission announced thousands of voter facilitation centres, the report says many voters were unaware that such facilities existed.
Difficulties faced by BLOs
A significant section of the report concerns the workload and training of Booth Level Officers.
A survey conducted by the Citizens’ Vote Protection Committee found that 23% of BLOs surveyed said they had received no training, while among those who had received training, many had been trained for only a few hours. According to the report, 56.4% of trained BLOs said they understood the process only partially, while 7.8% said they did not understand it at all.
Who are the BLOs? BLOs were often teachers and Anganwadi workers who had to perform their regular duties alongside SIR-related work. In some booths they were responsible for more than 1,500 voters. The report says that more than 80% of surveyed BLOs reported being unable to cope with the workload and more than 90% said their health had deteriorated. It also records the deaths of five BLOs which, according to the report, occurred after severe work pressure and mental distress
The report therefore portrays the problems of SIR not simply as a conflict between voters and election officials, but also as a process that placed considerable pressure on officials responsible for implementing it.
The problem of “Absent” and “Shifted” categories
One of the most important findings concerns the classification of voters as Absent or Shifted.
The report says that workers who were away from home when a BLO visited — particularly people who leave early for work and return late — could be recorded as absent. It also argues that internal migrants and tenants who had moved from one address to another were frequently treated as permanently shifted instead of being assisted in transferring their registration to their new address.
This becomes especially significant because 65, 45, 679 voters were classified as Shifted in the draft data cited by the report — the largest of the ASDDO categories.
The report argues that migration within Karnataka cannot automatically mean that a person has ceased to be an eligible voter. It cites cases where people living at their existing addresses were nevertheless classified as permanently shifted.
One crore names disappear from the draft roll
The most dramatic figures in the report appear in its examination of the draft electoral roll. According to the report, the 2025 electoral roll contained 5, 52, 49,719 voters. The draft roll examined by the investigators contained 4, 44, 53, 380, representing a reduction of approximately 1.08 crore names, or 19.5% of the earlier electorate.
The report breaks the deletions down as follows:
- Absent: 15,17,042
- Shifted: 65,45,679
- Dead: 16,39,864
- Duplicate: 7,09,870
- Others: 3,83,884
The report highlights Bengaluru in particular. It records a fall from 1, 11, 16,111 voters to 48, 48,574, which it calculates as a 43.6% reduction. Outside Bengaluru, it puts the reduction at 13.5%.
The scale of the Bengaluru deletion is one of the report’s central questions. It compares the draft figures with the number of people who voted in the 2024 election and argues that the remaining electorate appears inconsistent with the city’s actual voting patterns and population dynamics.
Contemporary reporting also confirms the broad scale of the exercise: more than 1.08 crore Karnataka voters were placed in the ASDDO categories, while about 43.8 lakh voters were subsequently identified for notices because of mapping or other discrepancies. Reported the Indian Express.
Who was most affected?
The report pays particular attention to the geographical and social distribution of deletions.
It says that, outside Bengaluru, some of the highest deletion rates occurred in relatively backward districts such as Bidar, Yadgir, Kalaburagi, Raichur and Ballari. It also notes high deletion levels in several SC- and ST-reserved constituencies.
The report gives examples of constituencies with relatively high deletion rates, including Gulbarga North, Narasimharaja, Raichur, Davanagere South, Vijayapura City and Bidar. It argues that constituencies with substantial Muslim populations and several reserved constituencies experienced particularly high levels of deletion.
The field investigation goes further. According to the report, some of the polling booths with the highest deletions were in settlements inhabited by nomadic communities, Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims and other economically marginalised groups.
Women were also disproportionately represented among those classified as shifted, according to the report. It attributes this partly to migration following marriage and says that women accounted for 52% of notices compared with 48% for men.
Ground verification tells a different story
Rather than relying solely on electoral statistics, the investigators conducted house-to-house verification in selected booths. Using a volunteer-based digital system, they compared the 2025 electoral roll, the draft roll, ASDDO classifications and notice information with the actual situation of voters. The investigation was still incomplete when the report was prepared, but the organisation says that numerous discrepancies had already emerged
Among the cases recorded were voters who:
- never received an enumeration form;
- continued to live at the same address but were classified as shifted;
- had submitted their forms but were absent from the draft list;
- were marked absent even though they lived at the address;
- were classified as dead despite being alive.
One particularly striking example cited by the report comes from Bengaluru’s Narasimharaja Colony. Of approximately 1,300 people in the locality, the report says 826 were still living there, had filled and submitted their enumeration forms, but were nevertheless classified as shifted.
The report also records cases involving nomadic communities in Ballari, voters in Kalaburagi, and families in Kodagu and other districts.
In the “Dead” category, the investigators found cases where living citizens had been recorded as deceased and therefore removed from the electoral roll. The report argues that such errors are particularly serious because the affected individual is effectively required to prove that they are alive and eligible to vote.
Forty-three lakh voters received notices
The next stage of SIR produced another major concern.
According to the report, approximately 43 lakh voters received notices. Of these, around 23 lakhs were associated with the failure to map their details to the 2002 electoral roll, while another 20 lakhs were identified through what the Election Commission termed “Logical Discrepancy.”
The report questions the basis for some of these discrepancies. It says notices could be triggered by spelling differences in names, differences in recorded ages or inconsistencies in the recorded ages of family members.
For people without passports, school records or other documents, the process of assembling acceptable documentation could be particularly difficult. The report says that promised assistance in obtaining residence and caste certificates was not easily available in practice.
The report also claims that Muslims received a disproportionately high share of notices under the Logical Discrepancy category. It records 21.44% of such notices going to Muslim voters, compared with 5.63% of Muslim voters receiving notices on this basis, according to the report’s calculations.
These are claims made by the investigators and should be read in that context.
Civil society attempts to fill the gaps
The report also documents extensive efforts by civil-society groups to help voters navigate SIR. Help desks and facilitation centres were established in several districts. Organisations trained Booth Level Agents, assisted BLOs, helped voters fill forms and created digital tools for checking voter information.
Civil-society organisations also pressed for more time for enumeration and appeals. According to the report, the Election Commission eventually extended the enumeration period twice, by a total of 19 days
The investigation report therefore records not only opposition to SIR but also a large effort by voluntary organisations to help voters negotiate the system once it was underway.
The continuing problem of re-enrolment
By September 24, according to the report, 7, 70, 988 Form 6 applications had been submitted. However, these applications included new voters as well as people seeking re-inclusion after being left out.
The investigators estimate that only a fraction of the 1.08 crore excluded voters had been restored at that stage. They therefore warn that the final number of voters excluded could remain substantial even after the claims and objections process.
This raises one of the report’s fundamental concerns: whether an existing voter who has been wrongly removed should have to undergo a process like that of a first-time voter in order to regain their place on the electoral roll.
“Operation Form 7”
The report devotes a separate section to what it calls “Operation Form 7.”
It alleges that, between September 20 and 24, large numbers of Form 7 applications seeking deletion of voters were submitted in several constituencies. It cites examples from Moodigere, Babaleshwar, Bidar, Bhalki and other areas.
The report alleges that many of these applications sought deletion of Muslim voters and were associated with local BJP or Sangh Parivar office-bearers. It also raises questions about the volume and apparent coordination of the applications.
These allegations are among the most politically consequential claims in the report and would require investigation and independent verification before being treated as established facts.
What the report says is at stake
The Anti-SIR Alliance’s broader argument is that the Karnataka experience reveals structural weaknesses in the SIR process.
For the investigators, the central issue is not simply the number of names deleted. It is the shift in the burden of proof. Instead of the electoral administration demonstrating that a voter is no longer eligible, the report argues, ordinary citizens are being required to demonstrate their eligibility through documents, hearings and repeated applications.
The report contends that this burden falls most heavily on people who are already disadvantaged: migrant workers, tenants, Adivasis, nomadic communities, Dalits, minorities, women, elderly people and people with limited access to digital systems.
Its ground survey is particularly significant because it suggests that some of the statistical categories used for deletion do not always correspond to what investigators found at voters’ homes. At the same time, the report acknowledges that its investigation covered only 100 booths out of approximately 50,000 and was still incomplete. It therefore calls for a comprehensive investigation rather than claiming that its sample by itself establishes the situation across every polling station in Karnataka.
A question about democracy and the voter list
The report concludes by placing the Karnataka SIR controversy within a larger question about the functioning of electoral democracy.
Its principal demands include stopping the SIR process, restoring wrongly deleted voters, conducting a fresh and transparent revision of electoral rolls, strengthening the institutional independence of the Election Commission and ensuring that eligible voters are not excluded because of administrative errors or difficulties in producing documents.
The report’s larger message is straightforward: an electoral roll is not merely an administrative database. It determines who can exercise the most basic democratic right, the right to vote.
The Karnataka experience described in this investigation therefore raises questions that extend beyond individual errors. How should electoral rolls be cleaned without excluding genuine voters? Who should bear the burden of proving eligibility? How should the system protect migrants and people without extensive documentation? And what safeguards are necessary when technology, databases and centralised verification become increasingly important to electoral administration?
The Anti-SIR Alliance argues that these questions cannot be left to individual voters to resolve one notice, one document and one hearing at a time. It calls for a process in which accuracy, transparency and universal access to the franchise are treated as the primary principles of electoral-roll revision.
The report’s central warning is that correcting a voter list must never become a process through which legitimate voters disappear from it.
Source: SIR Investigation Report – A Narrative of Betrayal and Tears, Anti-SIR Alliance / Citizens’ Vote Protection Committee, 23-page report. This article summarises the report’s findings and arguments; allegations concerning political parties, officials or deliberate targeting are presented as claims made by the investigators and are not independently established here.
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September 26 ECI Press Note: Does it not render SIR redundant?