ECI Published Detailed Data on Voter Roll Summary Revisions. So Why Not Bihar SIR?
Poonam Agarwal
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The final electoral roll released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) after the completion of Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls has raised more questions than answers, with many still struggling to make sense of the addition and deletion figures. A simple subtraction of figures – ‘Electors as on 24 June 2025’ and ‘Total electors in Final List 30 Sep 2025’ – revealed that nearly 47 lakhs voters were deleted in the SIR process. No other details were shared by the ECI.
The Bihar Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) website, however, reveals that historically, the ECI has released highly detailed, multi-format data following the standard Summary Revision (SR) of electoral rolls at least since 2009 till January 2025.
The stark contrast in data disclosure policy raises serious questions about the ECI's transparency, especially when millions of voters are affected, and is feeding concerns among political parties and electoral watchdog groups regarding the integrity of the deletion process.
Precedent of transparency
A little research on the Bihar CEO’s website confirms that in the past, the ECI adhered to a highly detailed data disclosure standard for its routine SR, which was conducted every year. This data was released in multiple, sophisticated formats, providing full clarity and allowing for public scrutiny. In previous revisions, the Bihar CEO released year-wise, detailed datasets that categorised the electoral roll changes in eight distinct formats designed for full transparency.
These formats included:
1. Constituency-wise gender ratio: Providing compiled data showing the number of male, female and third-gender voters in each constituency before and after the revision.
2. Population ratio: It provides the Total Population (Projected 2025), Electors as per Final Roll and the ratio of electoral to population in percentages. This data serves as a benchmark for checking how many eligible citizens have registered for voting. If the ratio is low, then very few eligible voters have registered – which is not good for democracy and demands action by the ECI to encourage citizens to enrol.
3. Age-wise distribution: This is crucial demographic data, typically broken down into specific age group slabs e.g., 18-19, 20-29, 30-39 so and so forth till 80 , allowing analysts to verify if a particular age group was disproportionately affected. It helps political parties to understand which age group to work with, depending on its population in a specific assembly constituency.
4. Addition and deletion details (Format 4B): This is the most important format that gives out granular details with multiple columns. The ECI must issue details under this format for the Bihar SIR as well. The columns include:
- The total number of claims lodged under Form 6 after the release of draft roll
- Total claims lodged in Form 6 after draft publication of roll
- Total claims admitted
- Total objections lodged in Form 7 after draft publication draft roll
- Suo-moto deletion subsequent to last publication of roll
- Total deletions subsequent to last publication of roll
- Number of deletions due to death, shifting/migration, or duplicate EPIC numbers.
5. Constituency wise EPIC & photo coverage of the electoral roll
6. Polling station details: In this format, the ECI gives details about the number of polling stations in urban and rural areas. It also speaks about whether there are more than one polling station in a building.
7. Information on Armed Forces: Constituency-wise figures of voters from Armed Forces of Union, Armed Forces of States posted outside state, government employees posted out of country.
8. Migrant workers: Bihar is a state from where many people migrate to other states for jobs. During the Bihar SIR, many voters were deleted from the draft roll because they had "shifted" from Bihar. In this format, the ECI has divided the figures under various heads:
- Electors found shifted during BLO survey since last publication
- Shifted with entire family
- Shifted without entire family
- Suo moto notices issued
- Suo moto deletion.
These eight formats, which are still available on the Bihar CEO website, demonstrate that the Commission has been adopting this method of sharing detailed data for transparency since 2009. Therefore, the ECI should be urged to share the Bihar SIR data in a similar format, including a separate dataset listing the names of deleted voters along with the reasons for their removal.
The next Supreme Court hearing on the Bihar SIR matter is scheduled for October 7. While the court previously denied the petitioners' demand for a stay on the process, it did order the ECI to include Aadhaar as the 12th eligibility document for voter registration and to publicly share the names and reasons for all voters deleted from the draft roll.
Considering that the ECI has once again failed to share details on the 47 lakh deleted voters, the petitioners are likely to demand in court that the ECI share granular data before the dates for the Bihar assembly elections are announced.
Poonam Agarwal is a senior independent journalist, advocate and founder of the ExplainX YouTube channel.
This article went live on October third, two thousand twenty five, at thirty minutes past eight in the evening.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.