The Vanishing Voter

India’s voter-roll revision promises accuracy, but the Opposition reads routine hygiene as authoritarian design.

The Uttar Pradesh government’s sweeping revision of electoral rolls has revealed an uncomfortable truth: a vast population of ghost voters had long been lurking in the system. The final draft of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has deleted about 19 per cent of names, meaning that on paper, every fifth voter no longer exists. Many of these deletions reflect deaths or migration. But to dismiss them all as ‘bogus’ – as the Opposition shrilly alleges - is to oversimplify a more troubling reality. Nor is this an Uttar Pradesh-centric anomaly. In West Bengal, nearly 9 per cent of names have been removed while in Rajasthan, roughly 8 per cent.

Indian politics, however, thrives less on data than on distrust. As news of this one-fifth evaporation broke, opposition parties accused the Election Commission and the Union government of foul play. The debate quickly shifted from why ‘dead’ or ‘migrated’ names had lingered for years to who stood to gain from their removal. That pivot exposes a deeper question for India’s political class: do parties genuinely want clean electoral rolls or merely a curated electorate?

Trading Accusations

Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav has labelled the SIR undemocratic and unconstitutional. In his telling, it is a backdoor version of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), using the Election Commission to do what should, if attempted at all, fall transparently under the Home Ministry. His case blends legal argument with political narrative. From demonetisation to vaccination queues and now document-heavy verification drives, Yadav paints a picture of a government that repeatedly forces citizens to “stand in line” and placing their rights and even their citizenship under perpetual suspicion.

The response from the ruling side has been predictable. Uttar Pradesh minister Jaiveer Singh dismissed the allegations as baseless and malicious, even crediting Samajwadi Party workers for assisting the SIR on the ground. If opposition cadres have indeed facilitated a process their leaders publicly condemn, it suggests a measure of political double-speak. It also raises a sharper question: if the SIR is fundamentally anti-democratic, why did opposition workers participate at all? Cabinet minister Om Prakash Rajbhar waved away the controversy as the sour grapes of habitual losers.

Beneath the partisan din lie two substantive anxieties. First, as Samajwadi Party spokesperson Manoj Kaka argues, if a disproportionate share of deletions has occurred in constituencies where the BJP won by large margins, it is fair to ask whether past victories rested partly on bloated rolls. Second, the case of Congress leader Gurdeep Singh Sappal shows how even informed, well-connected citizens can vanish from the registry. His name was struck off after he moved from Sahibabad to Noida, because the system does not automatically transfer voters across constituencies. If this can happen to him, the vulnerability of migrant workers, tenants and residents of informal settlements is easy to imagine.

The official breakdown of deletions offers scale, if not reassurance. According to R. Rinwa, Uttar Pradesh’s additional chief electoral officer, 46.23 lakh voters (about 2.99 per cent of the previous roll) were found to be deceased. Another 2.57 crore voters, or 14.06 per cent, had either permanently shifted from their registered address or could not be traced during verification. A further 25.47 lakh names were removed because voters were registered in more than one location.

District-level data shows striking variation. Lucknow leads the list, with around 12 lakh deletions, roughly 30 per cent of its electorate. Ghaziabad follows with 8.18 lakh names struck off, about 28 per cent. At the other end, Lalitpur recorded the lowest proportion, with fewer than 10 per cent of voters removed, while Hamirpur saw about 11 per cent deleted.

Elsewhere, the friction continues. In West Bengal, tensions between the Trinamool Congress and the Election Commission have reached the Supreme Court, which has directed the public disclosure of the names of 1.25 crore voters affected by deletions.

Restoring Trust

The problem of ghost and migrated voters is not confined to Uttar Pradesh. In the draft lists released during the second phase of revisions across 11 states and Union territories, a total of 3.69 crore names have been deleted. West Bengal alone accounted for 58 lakh removals; Rajasthan for 42 lakh. Earlier, Bihar’s SIR had already cut 65 lakh names.

When one-fifth of an electoral roll disappears, two questions demand answers. Who benefited for years from those phantom voters? And who now risks wrongful exclusion? The Election Commission’s one-month correction window is a necessary step, but it will matter only if it reaches every voter through simple, intimidation-free procedures.

The true test of the SIR lies not in its stated intent, but in its execution. Branding it a conspiracy is as shallow as declaring it flawless. The electoral roll is the republic’s registry of trust. If the exercise has exorcised genuine ghosts, it only strengthens democracy. The real measure will be whether the next roll banishes both the lingering phantoms and the wrongly erased, thereby protecting the vote through process rather than political theatre.