ECI’s SIR: Can You Lose Your Vote While Filling the Form?

Inside the Election Commission’s Confusing Voter Verification Drive

November 10, 2025

The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) form sounds like something designed to make democracy feel interactive, but for many voters it is more like a riddle printed on government stationery. While the ECI calls it an exercise to clean up and verify the electoral rolls, it has millions of people staring at a piece of paper and wondering whether their democracy runs on acronyms.

The form begins politely enough. Your name, your parents’ names, your date of birth and your address. Simple requests on the surface, except that the fields must match older records from older rolls. Some voters have no idea which year their names first appeared, yet the form expects them to know if they were part of an earlier revision, possibly in 2003. For a large share of the electorate, that was two governments, three jobs and several floods ago. The form does not care.

Then come the prefilled details. Officials proudly say that the form already carries the voter’s EPIC (Electors Photo Identity Card) number, constituency and photograph. In theory this makes things easier. In practice, many find their names misspelt or genders swapped, according to media reports. The website offers a chance to correct such errors, though this depends on the voter’s ability to link their mobile number, enter a one-time password and navigate a portal that loads when it feels inspired.

For the digital generation, the process may feel like an exam in patience. For the millions who are illiterate or unaccustomed to online systems, its likely to be a maze with invisible walls. The form asks them to sign or get an adult family member to sign on their behalf. In many homes, that means the eldest son taking charge, which sometimes leads to the entire family’s fate depending on whether he remembered to fill every column.

Booth Level Officers, the local guardians of this exercise, are expected to help. They visit homes with bundles of forms and promises of guidance. Some are earnest and well trained, others just as puzzled as the voters, as reported by The Times of India.

Reports from several states show that even these officers struggle to explain parts of the form, especially the sections asking for names of deceased relatives or missing voters. A few have turned to distributing the forms at tea shops to save time, which might be efficient but not exactly in the spirit of accuracy.

The design of the SIR assumes a country fluent in bureaucracy. It expects that every voter knows the spelling of their parents’ names as printed 20 years ago, that every household has a reachable mobile number linked to an EPIC, and that everyone owns at least one document from an approved list. It also assumes that voters can distinguish between an assembly constituency and a polling part number, which many cannot. Some may find themselves staring at the form like it is an exam they never registered for.

The process is supposed to ensure that no name is wrongly deleted or duplicated, but the complexity may have the opposite effect. A voter who cannot complete the form risks losing their place on the roll. The illiterate, the elderly and migrants who are away from home are particularly vulnerable. They depend on neighbours or relatives to fill the form, and one small mistake can mean disappearing from the democratic map until the next revision.

There is also the matter of timing. In practice, many voters are away at work during the day, and by the time they return, the officers have already called it a day. The officials later complain about missing data, the voters complain about missing officials and the process circles back to the next round of revisions.

For all its good intentions, well, allegedly, the SIR ends up testing patience more than it tests accuracy. It asks voters to prove that they exist and that their details have not changed too much since the last time the state verified them.

Democracy may rest on the simple act of voting, but before that, it rests on the far more confusing act of paperwork. For millions of Indians, it seems, the ballot is still easier than the bureaucracy that guards it.

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