Maharashtra voters who fell off the draft electoral roll have until October 12 to file a claim. The Election Commission of India (ECI) pushed the deadline back from September 30 after a request from the state’s Chief Electoral Officer, and moved the final roll from November 4 to November 16, ThePrint reported. Officers now have until November 10 to dispose of claims, objections and notices.
How big the gap is
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) draft, published on August 31, carried 7.72 crore names. The pre-revision roll held 9.79 crore. That leaves 2,06,88,487 people, or 21.14% of the old roll, outside the draft, according to figures reported by Jagran English and Scroll.
Officials sorted the missing names into five buckets: dead, permanently shifted, absent or not found, duplicate, and “other”. The last group includes people who did not return the enumeration form. Some of those deletions are real clean-up. About 34 lakh entries belonged to deceased voters and roughly 17 lakh were duplicates, as NewsGram reported. The remaining 1.5 crore or so names are harder to explain. The urban districts top the list of uncollected forms: Pune at 28.6 lakh, Thane at 28.5 lakh and Mumbai Suburban at 26.5 lakh, per Scroll.
That pattern fits how cities work. Renters move flats, families split between a native village and a city address, and a booth-level officer who knocks during office hours finds a locked door. A voter in any of those situations can land in the “absent” or “shifted” column without having moved out of the constituency.
Notices for voters already on the list
A second group needs to pay attention too. The revision flagged data mismatches for about 1.22 crore people who are on the draft roll, NewsGram reported, mostly because details of a listed relative did not match or could not be traced. Constituencies including Malad, Dharavi, Panvel, Kalyan Rural and three Nagpur seats each logged more than a lakh such cases. These voters may receive a notice asking for documents.
Chief Electoral Officer S. Chockalingam has limited who can challenge a name. Only a registered voter from the same Assembly constituency may file a Form 7 objection, the objector must submit proof, and the person challenged gets a hearing, according to NewsGram.
What to do before October 12
- Check your entry on ceo.maharashtra.gov.in or voters.eci.gov.in. Look at the name spelling, age, photo, address and polling station, not just whether the name appears.
- If your name is missing, file Form 6 with the prescribed declaration. Jagran English lists Aadhaar, proof of birth, proof of address, a passport-size photo and a screenshot of your 2025 roll entry as supporting documents.
- If details are wrong, file Form 8.
- If you got a notice, respond to it. Under measures the ECI announced on September 26, booth-level officers can collect documents at home and upload them, and hearings will be held online where possible, with any adult family member allowed to represent the voter, Republic reported.
The qualifying date stays at October 1, 2026, so anyone who turned 18 on or before that day can also apply through Form 6 in this window.
What comes next
The November 16 roll will be the list used for upcoming polls in the state, so a name left off now means queuing at a booth and being turned away later. Watch for two things over the next five weeks: whether the ECI publishes district-wise counts of claims received, and how many of the 2 crore names come back. Raj Thackeray of the MNS has already called for the SIR to be scrapped, Scroll reported, and the restoration count will feed that argument. For an individual voter, the date that matters is October 12.
Sources: ThePrint, All India Radio News, Scroll, Jagran English, NewsGram, Republic
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.