Booth rationalisation lands a hard blow on TN voters
CHENNAI: When Tamil Nadu undertook the onerous task of verification of 6.42 crore voters in just 42 days during the enumeration phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which ended on December 14, 2025, it also carried out a major parallel exercise of ‘booth rationalisation’, as instructed by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
This exercise had the objective of limiting the number of electors per polling station to 1,200 by increasing the number of polling stations in the state from 68,467 to 75,035. However, rationalisation has muddied the hurried SIR process on three crucial fronts.
The most significant consequence is that it has made it harder for voters not on the draft rolls to find their names on deletion lists.
Similarly, Booth Level Agents (BLA-2) of political parties, who are best placed to identify dropped voters, are struggling to help electors due to the rationalisation. Finally, the exercise has considerably obscured the true extent of deletions at the booth level.
When TN went to Lok Sabha elections in 2014, the state had 5.38 crore voters across 60,418 polling stations. A decade later, during the 2024 polls, the electorate had grown by 15.9% to 6.24 crore. Polling stations, consequently, went up to 68,144, an increase of 12.8%.
A year later, the SIR has reduced the state’s electorate to 5.44 crore at the end of the draft phase – a 15.2% fall that almost completely offsets the growth since 2014. Yet, polling stations have increased 10%, bringing down the average electors per booth from 936 pre-SIR to 725.
While the net increase in booths is only around 6,500, the polling station numbers – the ‘part number’ by which a booth is known – has changed for over 52,500 booths. Another 12,200 booths have been bifurcated, 567 trifurcated, and about 111 have seen their areas split across four to six booths.
Take polling station 50 in Chennai’s Harbour Assembly constituency. It had five sections covering streets in the Seven Wells area, with 1,434 electors before the SIR. In the rationalisation, this got bifurcated with three of these sections becoming booth 52 and two becoming booth 53. Before the SIR, these numbers denoted entirely different booths.
If a person from booth 50 wants to see if they made it to the draft roll, she can search online with their EPIC ID. If she draws a blank, her name has likely been deleted.
To confirm the deletion and reason, the person can access the deletion lists hosted on the chief electoral officer’s website using the constituency name and booth number. However, the catch is that these use the new booth numbers!
If the affected person downloads Harbour booth 50’s deletion list, it will show details from a completely different – new – booth 50. As the ECI has not made the mapping of old to new booth numbers available, this person would not know which booth’s deletion list she should check. The person cannot even be sure to find her name on the list pasted at their old polling station, as booth locations have changed for 2,509 booths across the state.
In fact, to produce this analysis, TNIE had to process the deletion lists of all the booths available on the ECI’s website through software tools to correlate old and new booth numbers, a task beyond the means of most voters.
A DMK BLA-2 in T Nagar constituency explained that his booth was bifurcated and all BLAs were given draft rolls of both new booths, but not the deletion lists.
“We miss out in correctly identifying deleted persons since we often assume it may be there in the other part. When a person asks whether his/her name is there, we have to go through hundreds of names on both lists to confirm it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the rationalisation has made it harder to understand the extent of deletions. Harbour booth 50 saw a whopping 772 names or 53.8% of 1,434 electors deleted in the SIR. Yet, 388 of these deletions are shown under new booth 52 and 384 under new booth 53, making the large number appear more modest.
This effect shows up in state-level analysis too. Booths that saw over 400 deletions were 3,280 when analysed by old booth numbers, but only 2,124 by new numbers.
Strangely, a TNIE analysis based on electoral roll page counts of 75,000 booths shows at least 4,500 booths could still have over 1,000 voters in draft rolls, with some exceeding 1,200. For instance, Kavundampalayam constituency in Coimbatore saw booths increase from 451 to 547, the highest jump in the state. Yet new booths 38 and 407 still have over 1,200 voters in the SIR draft rolls. In the other extreme, booths 52 and 53 in Harbour now have just 341 voters each, questioning the need for bifurcation
A district election officer from a southern district acknowledged the rationalisation should have been done after the claims phase. “During annual revisions, the norm is to carry out booth rationaliation during preparation of draft rolls. However, since both large-scale deletions and inclusions can happen during SIR, it makes sense to do this while preparing the final roll – a booth with 1,000 voters in the draft roll could theoretically exceed 1,200 in the final roll.
(With inputs from Praveena S A @ Chennai)