Hello,
Imagine being struck off the voter list and never being told why. This is what our reporters reveal in a new investigation on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
Over the last three weeks, our reporters have published six investigations exposing new aspects of the SIR in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. They build on the work The Reporters’ Collective has been doing since July 2025 to consistently expose the farce this exercise has turned out to be. We have published over 30 stories on the SIR.
Today, we bring you one more in that series. Like our last, this too is from UP, where the SIR process is already complete and assembly elections are due in six months.
The UP chief electoral office, which conducted the SIR, said it received 2.3 lakh objections to delete voters during the claims and objections period. That seems like a negligible number for the country’s most populated state.
But you know us by now. We don’t take the Election Commission’s numbers at face value. Our reporters Sumedha Mittal, Ayushi Kar and Shubhangi Derhgawen worked with data analysts to scrape Form 7 requests and check ECI’s claims against their own disclosures.
Here’s what we found.
The ECI accepted another 1.10 lakh deletion requests filed by individuals after the legally mandated deadline to file them. ECI rules bar this.
And the ECI’s software auto-generated forms to delete 85,854 voters, which election officials signed off on. No reason was given for any of these deletions, though the law requires specific reasons to be mentioned.
Read the investigation: In UP SIR, ECI Software Auto-generated 85,854 Forms to Delete Voters Without a Reason
These are some of the most important stories of our times, and a team of fewer than 10 people is pulling off this work. If this work matters to you, please support us.
It is the only way we can keep doing it. Donate Now.
Warm regards,
Furquan Ameen
Managing Editor
The Reporters’ Collective