CHENNAI: Over 97 lakh names from Tamil Nadu’s existing electorate of 6.41 crore have been dropped in the draft rolls as part of the Special Intensive Revision exercise released by the District Election Officers (DEOs) in all 38 districts in the State on Friday.
After the enumeration phase of SIR ended on December 14, TNIE in its report on December 16, stated that around 97.4 lakh names are likely to be dropped. The figures officially released on Friday confirmed the same, with the size of the State’s electoral roll shrinking by a sharp 15.2% to 5.4 crore.
Chief Electoral Officer Archana Patnaik addressed the media in the evening
Among the districts, Chennai saw the biggest drop of 35.6%. Around 14.25 lakh names were removed from the existing 2025 electoral roll that had 40.04 lakh voters.
Of the 97.4 lakh names dropped, roughly 53 lakh (54%) have been marked as shifted, 27 lakh (28%) as dead, 13.6 lakh (14%) as absent or untraceable, 3.98 lakh (4%) as duplicate, and about 16,400 (0.2%) as “other” reasons.
Chengalpattu, Tiruppur, Coimbatore and Kancheepuram also saw sharp drop in the number of voters. The districts’ respectively had 7 lakh, 5.6 lakh, 6.5 lakh and 2.7 lakh voters.
Five out of 16 constituencies in Chennai record over 40% drop
Chennai as a whole saw more than one-third of the electors (35.6%) from the existing 2025 rolls being dropped.
In five of the 16 assembly constituencies in the state capital, over a 40% drop in names in the draft rolls was seen.
The Anna Nagar assembly constituency had the most number of deletions with 42.2% fewer names in the draft roll when compared to the figures before SIR.
Apart from Anna Nagar, Villivakkam (40.7%), Thousand Lights (40.7%), T Nagar (40.8%) and Velachery also had over 40% deletions under categories such as absent, shifted and dead.
Virugampakkam, Harbour and Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin's Chepauk-Thiruvallikeni constituencies also had a large number of deletions—38.8%, 38.7% and 37.2% respectively.
In the whole of Chennai, only 25,79,676 of the 40,04,694 voters before the SIR made it to the list.
This included 1,56,555 dead, 27,328 or absent untraceable voters and 12,22,164 who were marked as permanently shifted.
In the Shozhinganallur constituency, under Chengalpattu district, a 31.09% drop was recorded in the draft rolls.
The numbers there dropped from 7,02,450 to 4,84,011.
District Election Officer J Kumaragurubaran told reporters that around 8-10 lakh voters could end up being added to the rolls at the end of the exercise via Form 6 (Application for inclusion of name in electoral roll).