Voter list cleanup in states, uts begins today

Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the Election Commission’s voters’ list cleanup exercise, will commence in nine states and three Union Territories from Tuesday. SIR in these states and

Union Territories with 51-crore voters will conclude on February 7, 2026, with the publication of the final electoral roll.

After Bihar, this is the second round of SIR. The State’s final voter list with nearly 7.42 crore names was published on September 30. The 12 states and Union territories where the second round of SIR will be conducted are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.

Among these, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala, and West Bengal will go to the polls in 2026.

In Assam, another state where polls are due in 2026, the revision of electoral rolls will be announced separately as a Supreme Court-supervised exercise to verify citizenship is underway in the state. Also, a separate provision of the Citizenship Act applied to Assam. “Under the Citizenship Act, there are separate provisions for citizenship in Assam. Under the supervision of the Supreme Court, the exercise of checking citizenship is about to be completed.

The June 24 SIR order was for the entire country. Under such circumstances, this would not have applied to Assam,” Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar said on October 27 while announcing the latest phase of SIR.

“So, there will be separate revision orders issued for Assam, and a separate SIR date will be announced,” he said. SIR will begin on November 4 with the enumeration stage and continue till December 4.

The EC will release the draft electoral rolls on December 9, and the final electoral rolls will be published on February 7. The ongoing SIR is the ninth such exercise since independence, with the last one conducted in 2002-04.