Delhi lost 13.39 lakh voters before SIR even started

Delhi's electoral roll lost 13.39 lakh names between January and mid-June 2026, before the Special Intensive Revision even began, according to an analysis of Chief Electoral Officer data published this week. The city's electorate had stood at 1.56 crore at the February 2025 Assembly election. By 16 June, when the roll was frozen for SIR, it was 1.45 crore. Ninety-three percent of that pre-SIR drop happened in five months of mapping. No separate list with reasons for those deletions was put out.

January 2026 alone removed more names than the first eleven months of 2025. During the mapping window the roll also gained 1.65 lakh names and saw 2.83 lakh modifications. The net change was still a shrinkage of 10.28 lakh. Officials call this continuous updation. Voters who later looked for themselves in the SIR process found that a name deleted in the spring never generated an enumeration form in the summer.

SIR then removed another 47.56 lakh names from the draft roll published on 31 August. Those are the Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Others cases whose forms did not come back. Combined with the pre-SIR cuts, well over a third of the February 2025 electorate is no longer on the list that will, after claims, become the November roll. Of the 97.53 lakh names that did make the draft, more than 33 lakh will get notices because they could not be mapped to an older roll or because the form tripped an anomaly rule: too many children on one parent, a parent-child age gap under 15 years, mismatched surnames.

The draft is not the final roll. Excluded voters can file Form 6 until 30 September. Notices and objections run to 29 October. The final roll is due on 4 November. The District Election Officer is the first appeal. The CEO is the last. That timetable only helps a person who knows they were dropped. Residents interviewed in the city said they did not know their names had come off in 2025-26, so no SIR form was ever printed for them.

A booth-level check in eight stations in Mangolpuri found about 1,800 names that sat on the 2025 roll but on neither the draft nor the ASDD list. A sample of 1,326 of those names matched back to 2025. Eight booths are not the city. They are a warning that deleted and never sent a form are not the same pile.

AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal attacked the Commission over the 47 lakh draft exclusions. The city BJP unit said he should file proof instead of speeches. Congress workers said they could not get data on unmapped voters. The fight is familiar. The new fact this week is the 13.39 lakh that left the roll before SIR started, without a public reasons list.

Mapping was supposed to link today's voter to an earlier roll so the summer enumeration would be shorter. In Delhi it also became a deletion machine. Officers say locked houses in the day explain missed forms. The CEO asked for an extension from 8 to 17 August because progress was slow. Slow progress produced a large ASDDO heap. It does not explain why January 2026 deleted more names than most of 2025.

Anyone whose name is gone has until 30 September to climb back on as a new elector, with documents. That is a workable rule for a person who reads election news. It is a weak rule for a person who only discovers the gap when a polling staffer cannot find them in November. The 13.39 lakh pre-SIR deletions are the group least likely to have been told. That is the number that needed a reasons list, and still does not have one.