NEW DELHI: A public audit held in Delhi's Batla House area on Sunday, October 18, 2026, has found that at least 100 voters from two polling booths in the Okhla Assembly constituency were wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate (ASDD) during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The findings, placed before a citizens' panel at the "Jan Sunwai" (public hearing), suggest that a significant number of residents who continue to live at their registered addresses were marked for deletion from the voter lists — and that in many of these cases, the enumeration forms and notices the process requires never reached the voter at all.
The hearing covered voters from polling booths 61 and 65 in the G and K blocks of Okhla. More than 150 voters registered to present their cases in person, insisting that the revision exercise had recorded them as missing from addresses they had never left.
The audit was organised by a collective of civil society organisations — Jan Sarokar, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), Voter Adhikar Manch, and the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW). The panel that heard the voters comprised Supreme Court advocates Nayantara Roy and Sumita Hazarika, along with transparency activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri.
The audit rested on a door-to-door volunteer survey conducted between October 9 and 16. According to The Indian Express, the survey covered 307 households and 1,579 voters — about 69 per cent of the 2,296 voters on the lists in the two booths. The Hindu reported that the audit covered 258 households across the two polling booths.
The survey's headline finding was stark: of 1,009 voters checked against the ASDD list and the pre-SIR deletion lists, 100 were wrongly marked for removal despite living at their registered addresses. Of these, 99 had been placed under the ASDD category during the SIR, while one voter had been deleted even before the revision exercise began.
The remaining checked voters fell into two other buckets: 434 were confirmed to be correctly listed, while 475 could not be traced or verified during the door-to-door exercise. Those 475 remain unverified — neither established as wrongly marked nor confirmed as correctly listed.
Beyond the wrong classifications, the survey exposed breakdowns in the paperwork of the revision itself. In 86 of the wrongly-marked ASDD cases, volunteers tried to track down the enumeration forms for the affected voters. In 27 of these cases, the forms had not even been generated; in four more cases, the forms existed but had never been collected from the voter.
The serving of notices fared little better. Of 570 voters on the notice list who were checked, 51 told the volunteers they had never received the notices they were officially recorded as having been served. Around 12 per cent of those who responded said no notice had reached them — a gap that goes to the heart of the process, since the notice is the voter's formal intimation that the name is under scrutiny.
The numbers acquired a human face at the hearing. Faiyaz Ahmed, 74, a retired professor of mechanical engineering at Jamia Millia Islamia who has lived at the same address for over five decades, was marked "untraceable/absent". His wife, Anjum Ara, 62, was listed as "permanently shifted" in the ASDD list published on August 31.
Zakir Hussain and Nafisha Begum of Joga Bai Extension were likewise recorded as "untraceable" and "permanently shifted" respectively, despite living in the locality.
Residents who have lived in the area for decades expressed anger at being described as "untraceable", "absent" or "permanently shifted" by an exercise that, in many cases, never reached their doorsteps. For these voters, the only remedy now available is to enrol afresh by filing Form 6, supported by documents and a self-declaration — effectively re-proving a place on rolls they never left.
The scale of the revision in Okhla is vast. The constituency had more than 1.85 lakh voters in the draft roll published after the SIR's enumeration phase. Over 67,000 names figure on the notice list and nearly 1.6 lakh in the ASDD list, giving Okhla the second-highest rate of deletions among constituencies.
The hearing doubled as a remedy camp. By 5:45 pm on Sunday, volunteers had issued tokens to 153 voters who turned up — 73 from the ASDD list, 56 from the notice list, 18 deleted before the SIR, five who had been cleared in the draft roll, and one case falling outside the SIR process. Volunteers helped 73 of them complete Form 6 on the spot, with supporting documents and self-declarations.
The special intensive revision is an enumeration-based verification of the electoral rolls. Voters found absent, shifted, dead or duplicated are placed on the ASDD list and face deletion unless their claims are verified; those on the notice list must respond to notices to save their registration.
The exercise thus places the burden of proof on the voter — a burden the Batla House findings suggest has fallen on residents who were never given the forms or notices the process itself demands.
The findings sharpen questions about the accuracy of the enumeration in the national capital. When 100 out of 1,009 checked voters on the ASDD and deletion lists — roughly one in ten — turn out to be wrongly marked despite residing at their registered addresses, the reliability of the underlying verification is called into question. The notice figures point in the same direction: more than 50 voters deny receiving notices the records say were served on them.
The un-generated enumeration forms are a third strand of the same concern. If forms were never generated for 27 of the 86 wrongly-marked cases the volunteers pursued, the affected voters had no paper trail through which the process could capture their presence — a failure at the very first step of the exercise.
For the voters of booths 61 and 65, the immediate path forward is the Form 6 route: fresh enrolment with documentary proof and a self-declaration. Whether the errors flagged at the Batla House Jan Sunwai trigger a wider correction across Okhla's 67,000-strong notice list and its nearly 1.6-lakh-strong ASDD list will be watched closely in the days ahead.
(Reporting based on The Hindu and The Indian Express.)