Bengaluru, June 28, 2026:From Tuesday, an army of Booth Level Officers will start knocking on doors across Karnataka, asking the state’s 5.57 crore voters to prove — in many cases for the first time in two decades — that they are who the electoral rolls say they are. The exercise, called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), is the most sweeping rewrite of India’s voter lists since 2002-04, and Karnataka is among the last large states to go through it before the process is expected to be complete nationwide.

It is also among the most contested administrative exercises in the country’s recent political history. The Election Commission of India (ECI) calls it a constitutional clean-up, weeding out the dead, the duplicated and the disqualified. Opposition parties, including the Congress government that runs Karnataka, call it a slow-moving threat to the franchise of the poor, the migrant and the undocumented. Both will be tested over the next 100 days.

Why an “intensive” revision, and why now

Electoral rolls are normally updated every year through a routine process called Summary Revision, in which existing entries are corrected and new 18-year-olds are added using standard forms. A Special Intensive Revision is a different animal: it discards the assumption that the existing roll is broadly accurate and instead rebuilds it from scratch through a physical, house-to-house enumeration, with every elector required to refile basic proof of identity.

According to the Election Commission’s own history of the exercise, India has done this only a handful of times — partial revisions through the 1950s and 60s, nationwide sweeps in 1983-84 and 1987-89, and a near-complete one in 1993. The last time it covered most of the country, including Karnataka, was 2002-04. That is the baseline the ECI is now using again: anyone whose name appeared on Karnataka’s 2002 electoral roll is treated as having already established their eligibility, while everyone enrolled after that date must, in effect, requalify.

The Commission’s order launching the exercise — issued on June 24, 2025 and addressed specifically to Bihar before being extended nationwide — laid out its reasoning bluntly: two decades of rapid urbanisation and migration have produced a roll riddled with repeat entries, voters who shifted address without being deleted from their old constituency, and, in the Commission’s words, an “intensive verification” gap around who is actually eligible to be on the rolls at all. Notably, the version of that order reproduced in Karnataka’s own training booklet on the revision still carries Bihar’s name throughout — a sign of how quickly the template built for Bihar’s 2025 election was repurposed for the rest of the country.

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A different kind of paperwork

The mechanics matter because the bar for proving eligibility rises sharply depending on when a voter was born — mirroring, deliberately, India’s citizenship law rather than its ordinary voter-registration rules.

Anyone born before July 1, 1987 needs only their own document trail.
Anyone born between July 1, 1987 and December 2, 2004 must additionally produce a document for one parent.
Anyone born after December 2, 2004 must produce documents for *both* parents — and, if a parent is not Indian, a copy of that parent’s passport and visa at the time of the voter’s birth.

That escalating structure tracks the Citizenship Act’s own three-tier test for who counts as a citizen by birth, effectively folding a citizenship check into what has historically been a residence-and-age check for voting.

The list of acceptable documents is itself unusually restrictive. It runs to twelve categories — pre-1987 government or PSU identity documents, birth certificates, passports, school-leaving certificates, caste or forest-rights certificates, land or house allotment papers, and a few others — and explicitly excludes two of India’s most commonly held identity documents: the ration card and the voter ID card itself. Aadhaar is treated more cautiously still. The Commission’s own guidance quotes Section 9 of the Aadhaar Act and Section 23(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 to make the point explicit: Aadhaar can establish *identity*, not *citizenship*, and cannot by itself settle a disputed claim to be on the rolls.

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What the rest of India has already been through

Karnataka is not the first stop. The SIR has rolled out in three waves since mid-2025, and the numbers from the earlier phases give a sense of scale — and of why the exercise has become a political flashpoint.

Bihar went first, between June and September 2025, ahead of its assembly election; roughly 47 lakh names, about 5-6% of the state’s electorate, came off the rolls. Phase II followed from late October 2025 across nine states and three Union Territories, covering some 51 crore electors; West Bengal alone saw close to 91 lakh deletions, and Uttar Pradesh around 2.04 crore — a phase that, taken together, reduced the rolls in those states by roughly a tenth. Phase III, announced on May 14, 2026, brings in sixteen more states and three Union Territories — Karnataka among them — covering an additional 36.73 crore electors with the help of nearly 3.94 lakh Booth Level Officers and 3.42 lakh party-appointed Booth Level Agents.

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Those deletion numbers have not gone unchallenged. Independent data analyses of the Bihar rolls — most prominently by the Association for Democratic Reforms and the volunteer group Vote for Democracy — flagged statistically unusual spikes in “deceased” and “permanently shifted” categories in the exercise’s final days, along with districts where deletions were heavily skewed by gender. The Election Commission has not disputed the underlying figures but has rejected the inference of irregularity, maintaining that the great majority of removals reflect genuine deaths, migration or duplication, and that political parties raised no formal objections during the process itself. The Supreme Court, hearing a batch of petitions challenging the exercise, declined to halt it but in October 2025 directed the ECI to also accept Aadhaar and existing voter ID cards as supporting (though not standalone) documents; in late May 2026 a two-judge bench went further, upholding the legal basis for the SIR altogether and describing it as falling within the Commission’s constitutional mandate to conduct free and fair elections.

Karnataka’s political fault line

arnataka enters the exercise with its own particular tension: a Congress state government overseeing a Commission-led process that the party, nationally, has loudly opposed. At a cabinet meeting on May 21, 2026, ministers discussed the deletions already seen in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, and Law Minister H.K. Patil indicated the state would consider every available option — including approaching the Supreme Court — if the exercise ended up stripping eligible citizens of their vote. The state’s BJP, for its part, has framed the revision as straightforwardly necessary, arguing it exists to confirm that only genuine citizens remain on the rolls.

Within the Congress itself, there has reportedly been some difference in emphasis between Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar over how hard to push back against the exercise versus how hard to help voters comply with it — a tension that has drawn comment from commentators who argue the document list disproportionately burdens poorer, migrant and minority voters who are less likely to hold pre-1987 paperwork. The Election Commission disputes that framing, and the document categories apply uniformly to every elector regardless of community.

The machinery on the ground

Whatever the politics, the administrative apparatus is large and closely specified. No polling station is meant to serve more than 1,200 electors, and no voter should have to travel more than two kilometres to reach one. Booth Level Officers will deliver pre-filled Enumeration Forms in duplicate to every existing household, visiting at least three times if a house is found locked, and electors can also file online through the Voter Service Portal. Recognised political parties get to appoint a Booth Level Agent for every polling booth, who may file up to 50 forms a day before the draft roll is published and 10 a day afterwards.

Quality control runs in layers. Each BLO Supervisor must independently re-check 10% of the work of every Booth Level Officer under them. Separately, roving “Roll Observers” are required to verify a minimum of 250 forms per assigned district — 100 additions, 100 deletions and 50 modifications — or, where time is short, at least 50 forms in the same 2:2:1 ratio, with a portion of those re-checked in the field rather than on paper.

nyone left off the draft roll is not without recourse. An elector can appeal a Registration Officer’s decision to the District Magistrate, and if still dissatisfied, to the state’s Chief Electoral Officer within 30 days — though the clock on filing fresh objections to existing entries stops ten days after election dates are announced, a detail that has drawn criticism for potentially time-pressuring genuine claims.

For Karnataka specifically, the published schedule runs as follows: house-to-house enumeration from June 30 to July 29, 2026; a qualifying date of October 1, 2026, against which every elector’s eligibility will be tested; and a final, revised electoral roll due to be published on October 7, 2026. A draft roll and a roughly two-month window for claims and objections sit in between.

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What happens between now and October will determine whether Karnataka’s experience of the SIR more closely resembles the Election Commission’s account of a routine, overdue clean-up, or the opposition’s warning of a process that quietly narrows who gets to vote. Either way, for the next four weeks, the most consequential paperwork in Karnataka politics will not be filed in Vidhana Soudha — it will be handed over at the front door.

This analysis draws on the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka’s “Booklet on Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls in Karnataka 2025,” Election Commission of India orders and guidelines, court reporting on the Bihar SIR petitions, and contemporaneous news coverage of the national roll-out. Figures for deletions and electorate size are as reported by the cited sources at time of writing and may be revised as the Commission publishes updated data.

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