The Supreme Court heard a petition on September 22 challenging notices sent to about 33 lakh Delhi voters in the Special Intensive Revision, with advocate Prashant Bhushan arguing the Election Commission had not disclosed why individual voters were flagged as a ‘logical discrepancy’ or ‘unmapped’.
The argument is narrower than it might sound. It is not, on its face, a challenge to the idea of revising the electoral roll, or even to removing about 47.7 lakh names from the draft roll. It is a challenge to whether the reasons given to each flagged voter are specific enough to be checked.
That distinction matters because a process can be reasonable in its goal, catching genuine errors and duplicate entries, while still being hard to challenge if the criteria used are not published.
A term like ‘logical discrepancy’ functions as a label, not an explanation. A voter told that phrase cannot easily tell whether the issue is a mismatched address, a duplicate entry elsewhere, or something else, which makes it harder to know what evidence to bring.
The practical stakes are large: with claims due by September 30 and a final roll due on November 4, the outcome of this case will shape whether millions of voters have a clear enough reason to act before the deadline.
Officials said around 97.51 lakh enumeration forms were collected or uploaded during the revision process.
The final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on November 4, 2026.
The deadline for filing claims for inclusion in the roll is September 30, 2026.
Special Intensive Revision is a process in which the Election Commission re-verifies the electoral roll, requiring voters to fill in enumeration forms and flagging discrepancies for further checks.
Prominent voters who received notices in the exercise included External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and BJP veteran L K Advani.
Supreme Court of India, New Delhi (representative image), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0