CHENNAI: In the heart of Chennai’s Kolathur constituency, Chief Minister MK Stalin’s stronghold, 62-year-old Arokia Mary and her family have been casting their vote in every election for decades. Even in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, this Thikkakulam resident and her loved ones made their way to the booth without fail.
Yet, four members of her family were dropped in the draft electoral roll released on December 19 as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Mary is among the 630 voters dropped from her booth, which had 1,366 electors before SIR – a deletion of 46%.
What is bizarre is that 846 people from this booth (62% of the booth’s total electorate before SIR) had voted in 2024. That means in the booth of 1,366 voters, the people voted in 2024 and the number of voters deleted add up to a near impossible 1,476. The two (% voted and % deleted when compared to the total electors present in the booth) make it 108%!
To frame it another way, if one were to believe that the enumeration process of SIR happened in a diligent manner, one should believe the following three corollaries: that every single person actually residing in the booth went out to vote in 2024, that the booth witnessed bogus voting to the extent of at least 8% or that the booth saw mass migrations in the one year since 2024 election.
TNIE’s field inspection and enquiries with officials and residents showed that none of these corollaries could be true, thereby indicating arbitrary and aggressive deletions due to inadequacies in the enumeration phase of SIR.
Of the 630 deleted in the booth, 391 (62%) were marked as shifted, 28 (4.4%) as “not residing (absent)” and a suspiciously high 211 (33.5%) marked as deceased, when only 11% of deletions were marked as deceased across Chennai. Inspection by TNIE showed many voters who are alive have been marked as deceased, including three persons from the same family in Shenbagavalli Street.
This booth is not an isolated case. Though changes in booths from 2024 to 2025 (during Special Summary Revision) and now during SIR have made comparisons strenuous, TNIE identified 38,338 booths whose ‘polling areas’ — the geographical limits of a booth — remained unchanged, allowing for apples-to-apples comparison.
Of these, TNIE shortlisted 1,500 booths that saw the highest deletions (ranging from 441 to 861 per booth) and fetched the number of electors before SIR and votes polled in 2024 polls. (This analysis could not be scaled up to all 38,338 booths due to time constraints since electoral rolls are not available in machine-readable formats.)
Shockingly, the Kolathur phenomenon (where the two numbers added up to 100% or more) repeats in 179 booths. In other 441 booths, the sum was between 95% and 100%, and in 541 booths, between 90% and 95%. These 1,500 booths are spread across 65 constituencies, of which 35 were urban, six semi-urban and 24 rural. Chennai and its peripheral areas accounted for over two-thirds.
At least four senior bureaucrats in Tamil Nadu, including one who is retired, all with vast experience in elections, told TNIE that booths where the two values add up to 95% or more sounded alarming, indicating high possibility of aggressive deletions.
“Both the major parties (DMK and AIADMK) are active on the field and the state has not seen any significant allegations of bogus voting in years. In such a scenario, close margins (the number of deleted voters and the people voted coming to nearly 100%) show that there is no buffer for voters who were absent during enumeration or those who stayed away from voting in 2024,” an officer in the rank of principal secretary said.
While TNIE couldn’t verify each of these 1,500 booths, it visited or spoke to officials for at least 24 such booths, all of which showed significant presence of voters who exist but got removed from the draft rolls.
There are a few booths where the impossible number of over 100% could be explained. Two booths in Ambasamudram constituency had 1,206 voters, of which 540 had voted in 2024 and 1,101 have now been deleted (136%). However, the two turned out to be on the Manjolai tea estates, where workers have been asked to vacate by 2028 following a court ruling to declare the area as reserve forest.
Many keep shuttling between the plains and hills while retaining identity documents in their estate addresses. District officials said they deleted the names since they are not “ordinary residents”. However, these voters would not be able to enrol elsewhere due to lack of identification documents.
Similar cases were seen in a few booths in Chennai where government-provided houses are undergoing reconstruction and two booths in Bhuvanagiri. While the BLOs deleted names since voters are not there now, the system lacks mechanisms to ensure they get included elsewhere.
The case in Kolathur is not the worst since many deleted voters, including Mary, have now submitted Form 6 with the help of BLAs.
However, in other booths — like two in Maduravoyal and one in Velachery that TNIE visited — people were unaware that they had been deleted until they were informed by reporters. “I submitted the (enumeration) form with the help of a politician in our area. Thought I had done my job,” said Jeevitha* in Maduravoyal, whose husband’s name found a place but not hers.
With the state receiving only around 19 lakh Form 6 applications despite 97.4 lakh deletions, chances are high that there could be several more Jeevithas.
*Name changed on request
(With inputs from Nirupama Viswanathan, Seyamla L, Gautham Selvarajan and Rajalakshmi Sampath @ Chennai; Thinakaran Rajamani and S Godson Wisely Dass @ Tirunelveli, and Bagalavan Perier B @ Cuddalore)