High Court Intervenes After Vapi Voter Vanishes From His Own Building’s List
The Gujarat high court last week ordered the State Election Commission to restore a man’s name to the electoral roll for the Vapi Municipal Corporation elections, scheduled for April 26. It was a fallout of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.
This is the second such order from the court this week.
The division bench of Justice N.S. Sanjay Gowda and Justice J.L. Odedra was hearing a petition filed by Shashankkumar Mishra, a resident of Ward No. 5 in Vapi.
Mishra had a straightforward complaint. His name was deleted from the Chharvada assembly constituency voter list in December 2025. He applied for restoration and his name was included in the preliminary electoral rolls by February 17, 2026. But when the Vapi Municipal Corporation’s electoral roll was prepared from that same assembly list, his name was missing again.
To make matters harder to explain, every other resident of his apartment building had made it onto the list. Mishra showed the court page numbers to prove it — his neighbours had been listed together as verified voters in a sequence. He was the only one left out.
His counsel argued that once a name is restored to the assembly constituency roll — which forms the basis for the municipal corporation’s voter list — it cannot be excluded from the latter. One list feeds the other.
The State Election Commission pushed back. It said Mishra’s name was dropped because the notified area linked to his voter entry fell outside the geographical limits of the Vapi Municipal Corporation.
The court was not convinced. It directed the commission to include Mishra’s name in the Ward No. 5 electoral roll. It also ruled that he would be free to file his nomination for the upcoming elections if he chose to. The updated roll was to be published on Friday.
According to the official release by the Election Commission (EC), large numbers of ineligible electors were removed during the revision process.
Recent data accessed by Vibes of India reveals that Gujarat reportedly recorded the highest net deletion, with as many as 68,12,711 electors removed. Madhya Pradesh followed with 34,25,078 deletions, reducing the electorate from 5,74,06,143 to 5,39,81,065 (-5.97%).
Reports surfaced that Gujarat’s electoral strength contracted 13.4% to 4.4 crore voters on completion of SIR. Nearly 77 lakh-odd names being deleted from the 2025 rolls and 9.5 lakh new electors were added to the final list.
This article was originally published on the Vibes of India.
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