New Delhi: The unusual situation earlier seen in West Bengal, of election officers using Form 7 to delete voters from the rolls, has now come to light in Karnataka as well. A report in the Hindu says the election staff tried to strike 61,059 voters off the rolls using this form well after the period of claims and objections was over.None of these forms submitted by the officials mentioned any reason and, what is more, the Form-7 applications were “auto-generated”. Further, the Hindu reports that when it checked the status of a sample of these voters, it found their names had already “already been deleted from the electoral roll”. Presumably, the Hindu cross-checked the status after October 22, the final deadline for processing these applications.It also remains unclear whether hearing notices or orders, which are mandatory before deletion, were issued in these cases, or on what grounds the names were deleted, as the relevant details had been left blank, the publication said.Further, in at least 26 Assembly constituencies, election officers filed more Form 7 applications than voters or third parties. For example, of the 17,491 applications filed in Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike South district, election officials filed 10,374 – the highest number of Form-7 applications.The 61,059 figure includes voters against whom Form 7 applications had been filed after September 23. These voters are also in addition to the over 1.07 crore voters whose names were expunged from the draft electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).Also read: After Facing Flak Over Bulk Form 7s Being Filed to Seek Voter Deletions, ECI Sets Limit of 10 Applications For One Person“Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs), listed as the objectors in these applications, said the system ‘auto-generated’ the forms with their digital signatures when voters could not be reached during hearings on notices issued for no mapping or logical discrepancies, and the voters were therefore marked as ineligible’,” says the report.Under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 an objection that is not filed in the prescribed manner, including stating the reason, is liable to be rejected, the report points out, referring to the lack of a reason for objecting to voters’ inclusion.The apparent culprit is the fact that these voters could not be traced by the EROs and AEROs, which led to the form 7s being “auto-generated” to strike them off – which in turn indicates a serious flaw in the automated system put in place for the SIR.However, it is not clear why more than 60,800 of these Form 7 application were filed after the claims and objections period in the SIR for Karnataka, which ended on September 23.Between August 24 and September 23, only 192 such applications were received, said the Hindu report. But on October 22, the last day for disposing of claims and objections (the process was supposed to consider Form 7 applications already recived by September 23), election officials filed 10,105 Form-7 applications, says the publication.Another 10,314 were filed on the previous day, October 21. On October 17 and 19, officials filed 11,132 and 11,760 applications, respectively.Rule 17 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, states that any claim or objection not lodged within the prescribed period or in the prescribed form and manner “shall be rejected by the registration office”.The development comes amidst reports of “bulk” Form 7 applications being filed across multiple Karnataka districts, including applications seeking the removal of more than 4,000 names from the electoral rolls, most of them belonging to Muslim voters.The same pattern has been observed in West Bengal.West Bengal’s caseIn West Bengal, the ECI filed appeals seeking to remove nearly half of the voters whom judicial officers had cleared during the SIR, The Wire had reported on October 21. This emerged from appeal records individually collected and verified by the Civic Research Group, an independent group of researchers, analysts and field contributors in West Bengal.Credit: Aparna Bhattacharya, The WireThe records, accessed by The Wire’s Aparna Bhattacharya, cover 30,00,545 voters who were placed under adjudication, had had their documents examined by judicial officers and were found eligible and restored to the roll.Also read: ‘Dear Bengal Poll Chief, How Many Voters Have ECI Staff Tried to Delete?’ Asks Jawhar SircarYet, as of October 17, appeals had been made against the inclusion of at least 14,75,887 of them, or 49.2%, nearly half, before the state’s SIR appellate tribunals. The commission is the appellant in these cases.In 222 of the state’s 294 constituencies, the ECI has appealed against between 40% and 60% of the voters that the judges had cleared. The lowest share, in any seat, was 21%. The highest was 80%. Just three districts, Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur, comprise 44.6% of all appeals against inclusion made by the Election Commission.Measured against the entire electorate, the appeals have been made overwhelmingly in Muslim-majority constituencies, The Wire reported. In the 41 seats where minorities make up more than half the population, appeals against inclusion amount to 5.9% of the draft roll. In the 89 seats where minorities are under 10%, the figure is 0.6%.Those 41 seats alone hold 40.6% of all the appeals in the state.In January, the ECI had said with respect to West Bengal that during the SIR there was “no limit” on how many forms an individual could submit against the inclusion of another person or persons on the voter list. However, if a person filed more than five objections it would trigger a mandatory review by the ERO.Nine months later, on October 9, 2026, the commission reversed its own orders. In an instruction to every state, it capped the number at ten per voter for the whole claims-and-objections period, citing “instances” of Form 7 objections being filed “in bulk by individual electors on unsubstantiated grounds”. By then, West Bengal’s roll had been finalised and its assembly election was long over.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.