In the first and second posts of this series, we examined the undisclosed software behind the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and the data and documents it demands of electors as a coercive data collection exercise. In this concluding post, we look at how digitisation which promised ease and inclusion has become a tool to disenfranchise the electorate at scale. Delhi has recorded the highest draft-stage deletion rate of any state or Union Territory (UT) in the SIR, at 32.78% of its electorate, and a Right to Information (RTI) response from West Bengal shows that 91% of the appeals decided by the appellate tribunals restored the excluded elector.The SIR was presented as an exercise to clean India’s electoral roll, to remove the dead, the duplicated and those who had moved away, and to confirm that everyone who remained was eligible to vote. Since June 2025 it has run in three phases, and it now covers every state and UT except Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. Whether it has produced cleaner rolls, or merely shorter ones, is the question this post takes up.Three terms recur throughout. The first is an elector excluded at the draft stage, one whose enumeration form was not collected or not digitised, and who was recorded as shifted, absent, dead or a duplicate. Such an elector must apply afresh on Form 6 to return to the roll. The second is an unmapped elector, one whom the software could not link to their own entry, or a parent’s or grandparent’s entry, in the roll of the last intensive revision. The third is a logical discrepancy, the commission’s term for a link the software did make but judged suspect, a parent’s name that does not match, a parent-child age gap of under 15 or over 50 years, an age that does not progress correctly between the old roll and the new, or a form submitted with no document or with Aadhaar alone.Delhi’s rules add further tests, such as five or more siblings, or siblings born less than nine months apart. A logical discrepancy is not a finding that a person is ineligible to vote, but unmapped and discrepant electors alike receive notices and must produce documents to stay on the roll. Part 1 sets out these rules, and how they varied between states, in more detail.The legal standard against which these outcomes must be measured is settled. Article 326 of the Constitution rests the composition of legislatures on adult suffrage, and Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as interpreted in the UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 25, requires that voter registration be facilitated, that obstacles not be imposed, and that conditions on the vote be objective, reasonable and non-discriminatory.The difficulty is not only the scale of the exclusions but the impossibility of verifying them, the exercise is justified in the name of accurate rolls, while the rolls are published in formats that prevent verification. The commission’s own presentation records the Bihar phase as completed with “Zero Appeals”, treating the absence of appeals as evidence of accuracy; the West Bengal record, examined below, indicates otherwise.The process has shifted while this series was being written. On September 23, The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected on record at least 14 times to SIR decisions, including the centralised control of ERONET, the registration officers’ software, which had curtailed the powers of Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), the officers the law makes responsible for the roll.The next day, Maharashtra’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) asked the commission for four changes to ECINET so that EROs could exercise discretion the law already gives them. On September 26, after a meeting of the full commission, the ECI announced nine decisions in a press note. Booth level officers (BLOs) are to visit the homes of electors served notices, collect their documents and upload them for the ERO’s decision.A hearing is to be held only in exceptional cases, at the ERO’s discretion and preferably online, and a family member may attend on the elector’s behalf. District officers are to set up help desks and special camps for people in night shelters, labourers, the poor and the homeless.Delhi’s period for claims and objections was extended to October 30; and ECINET is to be reviewed by a committee that includes an independent expert from an IIT or IIIT. On September 29, the commission removed the SIR declaration from the online Form 6 in states where final rolls have been published; it remains where the SIR is ongoing, including Delhi.The same day, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a petition contending that the SIR is void because the Chief Election Commissioner acted without the decision of the full commission that Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 18 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023, require.The scale of the deletionsThe first measure of the SIR is how many names it has taken off the rolls. In every state for which figures are available, the roll has shrunk, by lakhs of names in some and by crores in others. In Bihar, the electorate declined from 7.89 crore to 7.42 crore, about 65 lakh electors were excluded from the draft roll for non-submission of enumeration forms, and a further 3,66,742 names were deleted before the final roll, of which 9,968 carried no stated reason.In West Bengal, total deletions reached about 90.8 lakh, or 11.9% of the electorate, including more than 27 lakh electors found excludable after judicial adjudication of about 60 lakh doubtful cases. Uttar Pradesh’s final roll declined by over 2 crore net. Behind the deletions lay a larger suspect population, the logical-discrepancy software flagged 1.31 crore electors in West Bengal and 2.35 crore in Madhya Pradesh, 17.11% and 41.22% of those electorates, and West Bengal’s count fell to about 95 lakh within weeks as the rules were modified mid-exercise.Delhi shows the scale most sharply. Of it’s 1,45,10,299 electors, 47,56,722 were excluded from the 1st draft roll of August 31 as “uncollectable”, 43.32 lakh recorded as shifted or absent, 2.82 lakh as deceased and 1.41 lakh as duplicates. The total, 32.78%, is what the commission itself described as the highest draft-stage percentage in the SIR. Exclusions were heaviest in the Southeast Delhi district, at 6.79 lakh, and lightest in the New Delhi district, at 60,170. Burari recorded the highest constituency figure at 1.67 lakh.A further 33.13 lakh electors on the draft roll were marked for notices, 19.33 lakh for logical discrepancies and 13.79 lakh as unmapped. About 11 lakh names had been deleted before the SIR commenced, with no published statement of reasons. The UN Special Rapporteurs’ communication of May 1 placed Phase II deletions at about 5.2 crore (52 million).On July 30, the Union Law Minister acknowledged the communication in a written Rajya Sabha reply, defending the exercise as compliant with due process.The distribution of the burdenThe deletions and notices do not occur evenly partly due to how the software reads names which are the data entries. The transliteration engine’s failures are systematic rather than random. “Xalxo”, the spelling used by the Oraon community, was rendered “Khalkho” and flagged, Md and Mohammed, Sk and Sheikh, and Chattopadhyay and Chatterjee were treated as distinct persons.Each such mismatch between an elector’s name, or a parent’s name, and the digitised roll surfaces either as an unmapped entry or as a logical discrepancy of the parent-name kind, and therefore as a notice. The commission had to clarify that Amartya Sen need not attend a hearing after a notice over a spelling error.Additionally, The Wire’s district-level analysis found West Bengal’s notices concentrated in Muslim-majority districts, and the Special Rapporteurs recorded that in Nandigram 95% of deleted voters were reportedly Muslim, a pattern assessed against Articles 2, 25 and 26 of the ICCPR. Delhi displays a comparable distribution, minority-dominated and Scheduled Caste-reserved constituencies recorded exclusions of 20% to 45%, with Okhla at 45% and Patel Nagar at 42%.The People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) field report from Rajasthan documents the mechanics for Adivasi electors, names spelt differently across documents, absent surnames and fathers’ names varying within one family, so that an exact-spelling search failure by a BLO becomes a finding of “name not found” and then exclusion.Field verification continues to identify living electors among the deleted. A citizens’ audit in Mangolpuri found hundreds recorded as absent, shifted or dead who are alive and resident. Newslaundry found that in the New Delhi constituency, electors added shortly before the February 2025 election were deleted at rates of 33% to 40%, including residential students of a blind persons’ institution recorded as permanently shifted.The Reporters’ Collective located, at their new addresses, voters from demolition-affected booths whom the SIR had recorded as untraceable. Press analyses indicate that in 24 of Delhi’s 70 constituencies the draft roll contains fewer electors than the votes cast in the February 2025 Assembly election.Notices and hearings in practiceThe hearings under way in Delhi show what these notices demand of electors and officials. The Wire reported from Chhatarpur and Mehrauli, where 37.7% and 38.8% of electors in the areas visited had received notices. In Chhatarpur, a voter and his six siblings were noticed because the software had linked all seven to one father, the notice citing “a likely incorrect match”.Their father was noticed because the 2002 roll listed him as Kedar rather than Kedar Singh, and his handwritten school certificate was not accepted. Other notices arose from initials recorded in the 2002 roll, from a grandmother recorded as 40 years older than the elector and, as The Indian Express has reported, from twins sharing a date of birth.BLOs clear these cases on their own phones, using an app that lags under large uploads and fails mid-process, without allowances for travel or photocopying, completing a single form takes at least half an hour. One Mehrauli BLO held 248 notices, more than a hundred of them unresolved. Each notice is a flag the software raised and a field officer must now disprove by hand.The commission’s decisions of September 26 move this work to the elector’s doorstep. BLOs are now to collect documents at home, and a hearing is to be held only in exceptional cases, at the ERO’s discretion and preferably online. For an elector who holds the right documents, this is a real easing, and it extends to every noticed elector the doorstep treatment that, as Part 2 showed, had been reserved for those marked as VIPs; before the change, BLOs in the New Delhi constituency told The Wire they were making only house visits.Whether it is a meaningful remedy is another matter, for four reasons. First, it adds to the load of the officers least able to carry it. Delhi’s 33.13 lakh notices rest on about 14,000 BLOs who already work on their own phones and at their own expense, and at the special camps held on September 27 BLOs were still calling electors one by one without knowing whether they would come.Second, collecting documents is not the same as being heard. The judgment of May 27 upheld the SIR on the footing of notice, hearing, a reasoned order and appeal, but the press note does not say whether the elector will be told what is held against them or whether a rejection must be reasoned, and it makes the hearing itself depend on the ERO’s discretion.Third, an online hearing presupposes a device, a connection and a familiarity with both that many of the electors most affected do not have. Fourth, the change reaches only electors still on the draft roll. The 47.56 lakh excluded from Delhi’s draft roll are directed to apply afresh under continuous updation, on a Form 6 that in Delhi still carries the SIR declaration.Responses to the press note have been sceptical. In a discussion hosted by The Wire, former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi and transparency activist Amrita Johri described it as an “admission of guilt”. The Congress dismissed the proposed review of ECINET as meaningless and repeated its demand that the SIR be suspended. Retired civil servant K.B.S. Sidhu welcomed the home visits but noted that the criteria generating the notices remain unpublished, and that the press note is silent on reasoned orders and appeals.The appellate process and its measured outcomesThe West Bengal remedy was judicially constructed and operated under acute compression, District Judges were deputed in February 2026, 19 appellate tribunals of former judges were constituted in March, a same-day completion direction followed on April 6, and by order under Article 142 dated April 16 only electors whose appeals were allowed by April 21 and 27 could vote, with pending appellants excluded.The state went to the polls on an “incomplete final” roll bearing “Delete” and “Adjudication” markers against lakhs of names, in Malda, seven judicial officers conducting SIR hearings were taken hostage, an incident referred to the NIA on the Supreme Court’s direction.An RTI application by Congress MP Isha Khan Choudhury has measured the outcomes. As of August 7, of 38,07,838 appeals before the tribunals, 82,782, about 2% or one in 46, had been decided, and 75,443 of the decided appeals, 91.13%, restored the elector, with 7,339 exclusions upheld. On the only sample available, nine of ten tested deletions were erroneous, established months after the electors concerned had been excluded from voting.Further, only about 7 lakh of the 38 lakh appeals were filed by excluded electors; about 31 lakh seek the removal of electors, more than 20 lakh reportedly by the commission itself against restorations ordered by adjudicating authorities, and 74% of the 27,16,393 electors removed on adjudication filed no appeal.Justice Bagchi observed that exclusion from the roll amounts to “denuding a voting right”, and the court has directed a category-wise account of the pending appeals. Against this record, the Bihar “Zero Appeals” claim, and the commission’s October 2025 submission to the Supreme Court that not a single appeal followed the Bihar final roll, cannot be read as evidence of accuracy; on the West Bengal data, the absence of appeals measures the inaccessibility of the remedy, not the correctness of the deletion.The commission’s decisions of September 26 leave this stage untouched. The press note does not address appeals. An elector left off the final roll is told instead to apply for inclusion under continuous updation, as a new applicant, rather than to seek the reversal of a wrongful deletion.On the West Bengal record, the difference matters, an appeal that succeeds nine times in ten is evidence that the original decisions were wrong, while a fresh application puts the burden of starting again on the elector who was wrongly removed. Nor does the proposed review of ECINET reach the outcomes. The committee is to check that the software complies with the Acts and Rules, not whether the deletions it produced were correct.Access to the rolls and the portalsThe exercise assumes that an elector can locate their own, or their parents’, entry in the legacy rolls. Those rolls are non-searchable scans, no search interface extends to them, and two retired senior officials documented manually reviewing every polling-station PDF, seven separate Bengali-script lists for a single school, without finding their own names.The portal’s disclaimer states that the data is published “exactly as received from state chief electoral officers”, with the ECI merely hosting it.The PUCL recorded that one of two roll links supplied by a state CEO was inaccessible owing to a font problem. When West Bengal’s post-SIR rolls were published in February 2026, the CEO’s portal became inoperative the same day, and the ECINET application continued loading without result. Phase III reproduces the failure, hundreds of complaints in Delhi’s opening week. Telangana’s 2002 rolls, outside Hyderabad, effectively searchable only in Telugu.Karnataka’s manually prepared and later digitised 2002 list producing spelling, transliteration and family-linkage defects, with 2.18% of forms digitised in the opening three days, deadlines extended in four states on July 15, and Delhi’s calendar revised twice, and again on September 26 when its period for claims and objections was extended to 30 October. Kerala’s official guidance stated the operative rule, a form the booth level officer has not digitised is a name that will not appear in the roll.The commission’s own search portal advises users to “try different spelling variations” where an exact-name search fails, an official acknowledgment that the matching on which eligibility rests is spelling-sensitive.Disclosure has followed litigation rather than preceded it. The list of Delhi’s 33 lakh noticed electors was published on September 18 and 19, days before the Supreme Court hearing on September 22, with booth-wise reasons for each notice, the draft roll is searchable by EPIC, name or mobile number, while the noticed-electors files are not searchable by EPIC.The baseline pre-SIR roll remains unpublished, the complete flagging criteria undisclosed, and to compute deletion rates The Reporters’ Collective had to extract the booth-wise files programmatically, describing the portal’s architecture as a digital wall against aggregate analysis. The commission’s decisions of September 26 add help desks and special camps for people in night shelters, labourers and the homeless, which may ease physical access. They do nothing to make the legacy rolls searchable, the notice lists searchable by EPIC, or the rolls available for independent analysis.The reference roll and the asymmetry of disclosureA single reform underlies each of these posts, publication of the rolls, the flags and the deletions in machine-readable form, so that parties, researchers and electors can verify the outputs. The application seeking this was treated as raising privacy concerns, with reference to Kamal Nath v Election Commission of India (2019), and closed without adjudication.The asymmetry is notable, privacy is invoked to withhold machine-readable rolls for audit, while booth-wise lists naming individuals as absent, dead, duplicate or discrepant are published, the Phase II order itself directed CEOs to consolidate the excluded-electors lists on their websites “in an accessible format”. Privacy-preserving designs for publicly auditable rolls exist in the technical literature, the obstacle is not technical.The reference instrument has proved unstable in every respect. In July 2025, the Delhi CEO’s website displayed the 2008 intensive-revision roll as the last SIR, and Uttarakhand’s CEO uploaded its 2006 roll; the October 2025 instructions fix Uttarakhand’s baseline at 2003 and the Delhi CEO’s note of May 15 fixes the Delhi’s at 2002, with no published order explaining the substitution.Scroll reported that the commission could not trace its own 2003 revision order, an official stating “There was no digitalisation in those times”, the then Chief Election Commissioner had explained that the 2002–04 revisions were undertaken because the rolls of the time were riddled with missing names, so the baseline now treated as sacrosanct was itself a corrective for defective rolls. Lal Babu Hussein v Electoral Registration Officer (1995) attaches a presumption of validity to persons on the rolls; mass algorithmic flagging against an unstable, admittedly inaccurate baseline inverts it. Until the data is published, about 5.2 crore deletions in Phase II alone remain unverifiable outside the commission.The commission’s concessions of late September 2026 bear out this argument. The discretion the law places in the ERO had been taken away through software, and it is being restored the same way, through changes to an application, announced by press note, without a published specification, an audit, or an account of what the software did before. A review committee headed by one of the commission’s own officers is no substitute for publishing the rules and the rolls, so that anyone can check them.ActionIFF will file applications under the Right to Information Act, 2005, seeking what the commission has not published, the complete flagging criteria applied in each state, with their version history, the number of electors excluded, flagged and served notices in each constituency, by reason, the number of notices resolved since September 26 through BLO visits, through hearings and through online hearings, with their outcomes, appeal outcomes in every state, the terms of reference of the ECINET review committee, and the rolls themselves in machine-readable form.We will publish the responses, and will examine the commission’s status report when the Supreme Court takes up the Delhi matter in October 2026.This article was first published on Internet Freedom Foundation as part of a series analysing the SIR. Read the original.