Firoza Bibi Mondal asked to check whether her name was included in the supplementary list published by the electoral tribunal. A loyal voter for the last three and a half decades, this is the first time she would not be able to cast her ballot. She was pinning her hopes on the chance that her name would be cleared by the tribunal at the very last minute, allowing her, like the rest of her family, to walk to the booth on polling day and vote.Well, miracles often escape the poor. That is precisely the case this time as well. Firoza remains one of those 12,86,148 citizens who would not be able to cast their vote this election, a democratic tragedy that Supreme Court Justice Joymalya Bagchi casually dismissed with the remark, “This election, yes, perhaps they can’t vote.”If the six names formally deleted by the tribunal are also counted, the number of people without relief rises to 12,86,154. For them, the constitutional promise of the vote has been reduced to a matter of timing, paperwork, and institutional capacity.The systemic disenfranchisement that Firoza and millions face is the direct result of the deeply flawed Special Institutional Review (SIR) process. Rather than functioning as a fair and transparent electoral audit, the SIR process has operated as an aggressive mechanism for mass erasure. By weaponising minor clerical errors and demanding stringent historical documentation that marginalised citizens struggle to produce, the process has unfairly shifted the burden of proof onto the voters.Instead of strengthening democracy, this bureaucratic overreach has arbitrarily stripped lifelong citizens of their fundamental democratic right without adequate warning, leaving them at the mercy of a sluggish administrative machine.Also read: Why Election Commission Leaving 27 Lakh Voters in Limbo is a Threat to DemocracyThe sheer absurdity of these mass deletions is fully exposed when examining the tribunal’s review numbers. Out of the tiny fraction of cases processed ahead of polling day, 1,468 people were restored to the voter list, while a mere 6 names were confirmed for deletion. This represents a staggering inclusion rate of over 99.59% for those fortunate enough to be reviewed, proving beyond a doubt that the initial exclusions were overwhelmingly incorrect and executed without due diligence. Yet, for the hundreds of thousands whose cases are still pending and who were not reviewed before Phase 2 polling on April 29, 2026, the inclusion rate is a tragic zero per cent.The difference between 99.59% inclusion in decided cases and 0% (zero) inclusion among the pending is the difference between justice and administrative abandonment. As a share of all those initially found not eligible, the restored voters formed only about 0.114%. This is not a relief mechanism proportionate to the scale of the harm. It is a narrow escape route through which only a few could pass.Firoza Bibi Mondal. Photo: Aparna Bhattacharya. The Supreme Court’s intervention allowed voters cleared by appellate tribunals to vote, provided their appeals were decided before the relevant deadlines for the two phases of polling. The court also clarified that pending appeals would not by themselves confer the right to vote. In formal legal language, that may sound like procedural caution. On the ground, it means something harsher.A voter may have documents, may have voted for decades, may have appealed, may still be eligible, and yet may be denied the booth simply because the machinery did not move fast enough. The right to vote becomes conditional not only on citizenship and eligibility, but on whether the state can process one’s case before the election clock runs out.The injustice of the tribunal process is further compounded by a severe geographic bottleneck. In Phase 2, only 70 out of the 142 constituencies had any cases reviewed by the tribunal before the polls. This means that voters in more than half of the constituencies were entirely abandoned, denied even the theoretical possibility of a last-minute restoration. When looking at the seats that were reviewed, a troubling picture of systemic privilege emerges.Also read: ‘What Can I Do About EC Rules?’ Asks BJP MP as Voters Vanish from the Rolls in Bengal’s Matua BeltA correlation analysis between the number of restored voters and constituency demographics reveals a moderate positive correlation of 0.335 with urbanisation. However, looking at the absolute numbers exposes a far starker disparity. Of the 1,468 voters restored, a staggering 1,388 belonged to wholly urban constituencies, while a mere 42 were restored from mostly rural seats. Urban voters, who generally possess better access to legal resources, internet connectivity, and transportation to tribunal centres, found it marginally easier to reclaim their rights.Conversely, the rural poor, isolated by geographical and institutional barriers, were left disenfranchised by default, unable to mount the vigorous defence required by the draconian SIR process.Analysing the relationship between restorations and minority populations exposes a disturbing paradox. At the constituency level, the correlation between the number of restored voters and the Muslim or minority population percentage is a mere 0.079. Statistically, this is a very weak positive correlation, suggesting on paper that the volume of restored voters has almost no direct relationship with the overall minority demographics of a given area.However, a granular, name-based demographic analysis of the Elector Data Extraction sheet tells a vastly different, deeply human story. Extracting the 1,468 names of successfully restored voters and running a classification heuristic based on common Muslim identifiers, such as Md, Ali, Bibi, Khatun, Sheikh, Rahman, Ansari, and Begum, reveals an undeniable individual impact. Out of the 1,468 total restored voters assessed, 745 were identified as Muslims. This constitutes approximately 50.75% of the total restorations.While constituency-level data might dilute the appearance of targeted disenfranchisement on paper, the fact that over half of the successfully restored voters belong to the Muslim community suggests they were disproportionately swept up in the initial wave of deletions. They were forced to fight tooth and nail to prove their citizenship in a system that presumed them ineligible by default.Firoza’s case is therefore not an anecdote outside the data. It is the data made visible. Behind 12,86,148 pending cases are voters who did not ask for a favour, only for the restoration of a right. The SIR process has failed its citizens on every conceivable metric – geographically, demographically, and morally. Until the administration recognizes that a single vote denied to a citizen like Firoza is a profound failure of the state, the electoral process will remain a tool of marginalisation rather than the ultimate equaliser of democracy.Note: The total number of voters rendered non-eligible due to falling in the Under Adjudication category is 12,87,622. Of these, 1,486 have been cleared, while 6 who were meant to vote in the second phase, stand deleted, arriving at the 12,86,154 figure for people left without relief. Since the electoral rolls stand frozen, there is no chance that these deleted voters will be able to reach the polling booths on April 29, the last and final day of voting in West Bengal.