CHENNAI: The draft electoral roll to be released on Friday as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of poll rolls in Tamil Nadu is likely to have 5.44 crore voters, a 15.2% reduction from the 6.41 crore voters in the 2025 roll taken as the base count for SIR. Chennai may see the biggest drop, with 35.6% voter names likely to be removed.
As per a report generated on Monday for officials to monitor the exercise, seen by TNIE, 97.4 lakh names may be dropped as their enumeration forms have been marked as “uncollectable” due to various reasons.
Of the 97.4 lakh names, 52.6 lakh (54.2%) have been marked as permanently shifted, 26.9 lakh (27.7%) as dead, 13.6 lakh (13.9%) as untraceable, 3.98 lakh (4.1%) as duplicate, and about 16,400 (0.2%) as “uncollectable” due to “other” reasons. With the last leg of work for publishing the SIR draft still under way, the final figures may slightly vary.
Chennai’s electorate may shrink by 35.6% in the draft roll from its present size of 40.05 lakh to 25.8 lakh. Of the 14.26 lakh “missing” names in the draft rolls, which is more than one third of its present size, 12.23 lakh (85.8%) have been marked as permanently shifted.
In 10 districts, voter count may drop by over 15%
Chennai’s neighbour Chengalpattu is expected to see the second biggest drop of 25.18% with roughly 7 lakh names likely to be dropped from the total size of 27.87 lakh voters.
Tiruppur and Coimbatore followed with an expected reduction of 23.1% and 20.2% respectively. Of the 24.4 lakh voters in Tiruppur, 5.6 lakh names are likely to be dropped. In Coimbatore, the total voters and the number of names likely to be dropped are 32.2 lakh and 6.5 lakh, respectively.
Six other districts that may see their SIR draft roll shrink by over 15% are Kancheepuram, Tiruvallur, Dindigul, Vellore, Erode, and Tirunelveli (Please refer to the table).
The percentage of names likely to be dropped is less than 10% in only 10 of the 38 districts in TN. Ariyalur, which has the smallest electorate of 5.3 lakh, is expected to see the lowest drop in names of just 4.6% in the draft roll.
The percentage of voters marked as either “untraceable or absent” or “permanently shifted” is high in urbanised districts such as Chennai, Chengalpattu, Coimbatore, Kancheepuram, Tiruvallur, Vellore, Madurai and Tiruppur.
Of the 5.44 crore voters expected to be in the draft roll, the report indicated that 2.02 crore have been mapped with their own names in the roll from the previous SIR rolls (in 2002 or 2005), 3.29 crore have been mapped as progeny of those present in the previous SIR rolls and the remaining, roughly 12.35 lakh, have been marked as “No Mapping”.
In comparison, the number of electors dropped in the draft roll of SIR for Bihar was 65 lakh, which was 8.24% of the electorate of 7.89 crore prior to the exercise. With a net addition of 17.9 lakh voters during the claims and objections phase, the final roll published after the SIR had 7.42 crore voters.
The CEO has already emphasised that persons whose names have not been included in the draft roll can make use of the “Claims and Objections” process that will follow the publication of draft roll to get themselves included.
ECI officials have stressed that everyone involved in the SIR exercise has been sensitised to ensure that no eligible voter gets missed from the final roll.