Over 99% voters served notices during Maharashtra SIR added to electoral rolls

More than 99% of the 1.2 crore voters who had been served notices during the special intensive revision in Maharashtra have been added back to the electoral rolls, the Hindustan Times reported on Saturday.

The remaining 72,601 voters who had been served notices are yet to submit documents to verify their identity, or the verification of their details is underway, according to the newspaper.

Of the total, 62.5 lakh voters had been issued notices for “logical discrepancies”, while 59.7 lakh for not being linked to the electoral roll of 2002, when the special intensive revision was last conducted in Maharashtra.

Logical discrepancies refer to what the panel considers inconsistencies such as a mismatch with the spellings of names of the voters’ parents, an unreasonably low gap between the ages of parents and children or if parents have more than six children.

In the draft voter list published on August 31, the names of more than two crore persons were removed from the electoral roll. The electors excluded from the draft account for 21.1% of the state’s voter base before the revision exercise began.

The final voter list will be published on November 30.

Those who had been issued notices were added to the voter rolls after the Election Commission expanded the list of accepted documents to include the Permanent Account Number card and Aadhaar card, which were earlier excluded, the Hindustan Times reported. The poll panel also scrapped mandatory personal hearings with booth-level officers and allowed voters to submit documents through WhatsApp.

Maharashtra is among the 19 states and Union Territories where the voter roll revision is being carried out in the third phase of SIR.

15 lakh Form 6 applications

Additionally, between August 31 and November 12, the Election Commission received 23.6 lakh applications for the addition and deletion of names from the electoral rolls and corrections to voter details, the newspaper reported.

Of the total, 15.1 lakh were Form 6 applications seeking to be added as voters, 1.2 lakh were Form 7 applications for deletion and 7.1 lakh were Form 8 applications for corrections or changes to voters’ details.

The period for filing claims and objections in Maharashtra ended on Friday. The window for disposing of the claims will close on November 25.

A contentious exercise

In 2025, the first phase of special intensive revision was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026.

Since the exercise began, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the revision. But it said that the exercise does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• Follow Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls here.
• SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial