Government Schemes and Policy · 2 October 2026
Election Commission orders special enrolment drive for voters left out after SIR deletions
Exam-focused facts from the 2 October 2026 current affairs briefing.
Key facts
- The Election Commission of India has directed the 20 states and Union Territories where the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is complete to run a special drive to enrol voters left out of the rolls, conveyed in writing on September 29 and repeated at a video conference with all Chief Electoral Officers.
- The enrolment drive will use Form 6 without the question added in July asking whether applicants or their parents were on the voters' list after the last SIR; the declaration will now apply during the SIR phase only, with Registration of Electors Rules 1960 forms used otherwise.
- Chief Electoral Officers have been told to compare pre-SIR and post-SIR rolls, identify deleted voters who may have been left out, visit their homes, and seek assistance of political parties or their booth-level agents to get Form 6 filled.
- Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected on record 14 times in 10 months to decisions taken in the Commission's name without their knowledge, including the change to Form 6 and the centralised control of ECINet.
- Goa's Chief Electoral Officer had to re-enrol 97 eligible voters left out of the final roll published on February 21 after ECINet offered no option to reverse their deletion.
- At its September 26 meeting, the Commission decided that voters served notices for being 'unmapped' or for 'logical discrepancies' need not appear for hearings, and set up a committee with an independent IIT/IIIT expert to review ECINet.
- Maharashtra, the largest state where SIR is still under way, has instructed Electoral Registration Officers not to exclude any voter in haste, with Booth Level Officers collecting documents at voters' homes and special camps scheduled on October 3, 4, 10 and 11.
- Maharashtra's draft roll flagged 1.22 crore records for verification: 62.48 lakh for discrepancies in relatives' details and 59.75 lakh that could not be mapped to a relative in the previous roll.