Records show that as many as 5,38,320 voters have been struck off West Bengal’s final electoral roll through Form 7 objections without any person having filed them. The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) West Bengal’s own statement confirms that these deletions included auto-generated rejections by the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s software. Interestingly, not one of them recorded a reason for the deletion.The removals took place between the publication of the draft roll on December 14, 2025 and of the final roll on February 28, 2026 during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The CEO’s statement confirming this came on March 6, two days after TMC (then united) general secretary Abhishek Banerjee had alleged that the Form 6 and Form 7 figures in the daily bulletins and the final roll did not match.Form 6 is for inclusion of a new name into the final SIR rolls. Form 7 is for electors to object to or seek deletion of another elector’s name from the roll. The objection can be raised if the person has shifted, is absent, is already enrolled elsewhere or is not a citizen. The electoral registration officer (ERO) examines the objection before deciding. Every Form 7 that results in a deletion is then entered in a public register.What did the CEO state?The CEO’s statement on March 6 read: “The figure of deletion due to Form 7 as mentioned, includes the auto generated Form 7 generated due to rejection of Enumeration Forms (EFs) as electors not found eligible for Final Roll. This Figure which was received from ECI (Election Commission of India) by mail on 28.02.26 in 5,38,320 (sic).” Put simply, all these 5,38,320 were removed automatically by the system when an officer turned the voter down at a hearing. Only 7,733 of the Form 7 rejections because a person actually filed the form against them. The CEO’s daily bulletins had only counted Form 7s that people had submitted. So, the 5.38 lakh system-made forms were never part of those bulletins. According to the CEO, the Election Commission sent that figure to the state by email on February 28, the day the final roll came out.For comparison, the CEO’s daily bulletin from January 20 showed only about 42,251 Form 7s received in all.This explains why the numbers did not match. #FactCheck@ECISVEEP @SpokespersonECI@PIBKolkata @airnews_kolkata@AITCofficial https://t.co/t3qrqcGEMp— CEO West Bengal (@CEOWestBengal) March 6, 2026No reason for deletionThese 5.38 lakh forms give no reason at all. In the Form 10 registers – which record whose name was removed, who objected and on what ground – the reason column next to every one of them is blank. A person who finds their name gone cannot tell from the record why it happened, which makes it much harder to fight.Moreover, these forms were filed in the name of the same election officer who was deciding the voter’s case. In effect, the officer was both raising the objection and ruling on it. Under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, an objection that is not made in the proper way, with a reason, is supposed to be rejected.This does not mean every one of these voters was wrongly removed. Many may well have been ineligible. However, the problem is that the official record does not provide any reason whatsoever, and so nobody, including the voter, can check who was ineligible and who was wrongly deleted.In 99.9% deletions, objector is the EROChanges to the roll rest mainly on two forms, Form 6 and Form 7. During the SIR, voters whose records could not be matched to the 2002 roll were called to hearings to prove their eligibility. When an officer did not approve a voter at a hearing, the software generated a Form 7 in that officer’s name. In the Form 10 registers for 284 of the state’s 294 constituencies that The Wire checked, 5,23,998 deletions are attributed to the ERO, and the reason column is blank in every one of them.The Wire went through the Form 10 registers published with the final roll. Each row records who objected and on what ground. Of the 5,24,420 deletions The Wire could verify, in 5,23,998 rows – 99.9% of all Form 7-related deletions in these constituencies – the objector is the ERO, and the reason column is left blank in every single case. This constitutes about 0.74% of the draft roll.Only 422 deletions actually had an individual objector’s name. The 10 seats that The Wire could not access include eight in Cooch Behar and two in Alipurduar. They account for another 14,061 Form 7 deletions in total, and almost a third of them are in Kumargram village, Alipurduar. There is no way to tell how many of these were auto-generated.Same mechanism as Uttar Pradesh, much bigger scaleOn October 9, The Reporters’ Collective reported that in Uttar Pradesh, the ECI’s ERONET software had generated a Form 7 automatically, already carrying the ERO’s digital signature wherever an officer did not approve a voter at an SIR hearing. This is the same as the mechanism used in West Bengal; the CEO’s statement confirms it.However, while West Bengal’s draft roll is a little over half the size of UP’s, it had six times as many no-reason deletions.This matters because Form 7 allows only six grounds for removing a voter – death, being underage, absence, having shifted, being already enrolled, or not being a citizen. “Not found eligible at hearing” is not one of them. The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, say an objection not made in the prescribed manner should be rejected. The ECI’s own internal rules for SIR hearings ask officers to record why a person is removed.The ECI’s likely answer is that these voters could not be mapped during enumeration and later failed to prove their eligibility at a hearing. That is a fair point. Speaking to The Wire, Arindam Niyogi, the Additional CEO – West Bengal said that the Form 10 does not provide the option to give details. That brings the question whether someone removed from the form with no recorded ground can meaningfully challenge or appeal it.The CEO West Bengal’s latest press note does not help them either. Issued on October 6, 2026, the press note informed the “left out” eligible voters that the list of ASDD (Absentee, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate) voters of SIR 2026 is online, and that “any person in this list” may submit Form 6 to get their names back on the roll. While the press release did mention anything about the 5.46 lakh voters removed through Form 7, Niyogi clarified they can reapply through Form 6 even, though former election commissioners SY Qureshi and Ashok Lavasa pointed out, through their social media posts and columns, that it is meant for new voters only.Form6 can’t be filled by a deleted voter. It’s only for NEW voters. All those who have been forced to fill it have committed criminal offence carrying 1 yr prison. EC officials who forced them are abetters to crime. This press note shows ECI’s abetment! https://t.co/ga7FEjJoAG— Dr. S.Y. Quraishi (@DrSYQuraishi) October 2, 2026Districts that saw highest ‘no reason’ deletionsAccording to The Wire’s assessment, North 24 Parganas and Nadia alone account for 39% of the deletions through Form 7, whereas Murshidabad lost 0.27% of its roll this way, against 1.88% in North 24 Parganas.The seats with the most ‘no reason’ deletions are Matua and refugee belt constituencies such as Bagda (15,285), Bangaon Uttar, Bangaon Dakshin, Gaighata, Kalyani, Santipur and the Ranaghat seats. Dabgram-Fulbari in Jalpaiguri tops the count at 16,491. These seats had a far higher number of unmapped electors at the enumeration stage than the rest of the state – between 8.5% and 14.5% of the draft rolls against 4.3% statewide.Seats that the BJP won in 2026 lost 0.91% voters off their draft roll through these deletions, almost twice the 0.49% in seats TMC won. Border seats lost 1.19%, against 0.71% elsewhere. Urban seats were hit about twice as hard as rural ones. A name-based check of the registers flags almost no Muslim voters among those removed, the opposite of what was seen at the judicial adjudication stage.Against the 2026 marginsIn six of the 283 seats covered by the registers that The Wire was able to check for form 7 deletions, the ‘no reason’ deletions were more than the winning margin itself. The BJP won three of them, including the controversial Rajarhat-New Town along with Satgachia and Kakdwip. The TMC won Madhyagram, Harirampur and Amdanga. Most seats were nowhere near that line. The ‘no reason’ deletions are just a small part of the SIR’s larger damning effect in West Bengal. The overall roll contraction of deletions was bigger than the 2026 poll winning margin in 150 seats. This makes us wonder what the assembly election results would have looked like had they all been able to vote. The Wire has previously reported how the voters removed in judicial adjudication alone outnumbered the margin in 49 seats.This is a story about process and accountability, not the outcome. More than five lakh people were taken off the voter rolls through forms that did not give them a reason, at a scale far beyond what was found in any other state.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.