Electoral Roll System for India

The Special Intensive Revisions (SIR) since June 2025 have removed over 11 crore names. The process has been criticized for false-positive errors (removing citizens from the voter rolls), but also for its onerous documentation requirements and high-effort processes.

An Electoral Roll Operating System is required. India can maximally automate the SIR and establish a high-integrity process going forward. Most of India's adults can be added into voter rolls from existing records without a document demand. The remaining will be reached by a welfare-first outreach programme that enrols them in the schemes they are missing and registers them to vote.

The system will have five functions: Identity, Citizenship, Residence, Eligibility, & Lifecycle Maintenance. It will continuously maintain the electoral roll rather than requiring repeated rebuilding through periodic SIR exercises.

Data inputs

The government has direct access to these data sources that feed the proposed system. The system, itself, will present UI for data inputs and updates. This system makes it a citizen-friendly and transparent mechanism. Reliance on numbers such as Aadhaar, PAN, Mobile, etc. and their interlinks avoid the problems of name-matching. The Voter ID is a number itself.

Source	Scale	Proves	Role in engine	Limits
Aadhaar	145.32 crore generated (Sept 2026)	Identity, current address	Identity key and dedup; residence evidence	Not citizenship; dead holders not always deactivated
PAN, income tax	Over 50 crore PANs (2020)	Identity, father's name	Family edge	Issued to foreigners too
Mobile	128.2 crore mobile subscriptions (June 2026)	Contact; KYC identity; dominant night-time location	Outreach channel, consented OTP and home-location code for precinct	Subscriber is not always the user; tower precision varies; needs a legal basis (the ask)
Passports	About 10% of the population holds one	Nationality for travel; issued after police verification	Strong anchor, rebuttable	MEA said in June 2026 a passport is a travel document, not conclusive proof of citizenship; skews urban and better-off
Births & deaths registration (CRS)	99.1% of births and 99.4% of deaths registered in 2024	Birthplace, parents; death	Anchor for under-26s; death purge for all	Weak for adults born before ~2000
MHA citizenship grants	Small	Citizenship, directly	Anchor for registered and naturalised citizens	None material
Old electoral rolls (2002–04 intensive revision)	Every elector of that era	Prior enrolment as a citizen	Anchor: elector or child of one	Pre-2003 names need fuzzy matching across scripts
School records (UDISE+, admission registers)	Most adults under ~45	Date/place of birth, parents' names	Anchor (ECI already accepts educational certificates) + family edges	Older rural women least covered
Driving licence (Sarathi)	Issued by state transport offices	Identity, date of birth, address	Residence corroboration	Issued to foreign residents too; addresses often stale
Bank, Jan Dhan, insurance, fintech (incl. PF, PPF, etc.)	Jan Dhan: 59.09 crore accounts (Aug 2026)	Identity, address	Continuity of residence only	KYC is mostly Aadhaar, not independent evidence
ASHA / HMIS birth records	Births since ASHA launch in 2005	Birthplace, mother	Corroborates the 18–21 cohort — exactly the cohort needing both parents' status	Fragmented; not a legal birth record
Ration (NFSA), LPG, pension, MGNREGA	NFSA: 81.35 crore people on 20.29 crore cards	Household composition, long-run address	Family graph and continuity of residence	2.49 crore cards cancelled since 2020, some wrongly
Immigration records (Bureau of Immigration entry/exit, FRRO registrations, visas, OCI cards)	Every foreign national lawfully in India; biometrics mandated under the Immigration and Foreigners Act 2025	Foreign nationality; long absences abroad	The only adverse-evidence source: a verified match is referred to the ERO	Name-only matches are unreliable; needs a document-number or biometric match
Land revenue records (record of rights, mutations), registered deeds, property tax	99.81% of records of rights computerised; 37 crore+ parcels with a Bhu-Aadhaar (ULPIN) number (Jan 2026)	Decades of presence; holdings passed from parent to child	Family edge and pre-1987 presence for older rural adults	Skews male and landed: the landless majority of T3 is absent; title disputes; urban mapping only begun

The First Ask: mobile home location for the precinct

Location is fixed alongside citizenship. Many people are registered where they used to live, and some are registered twice. A mobile-derived home location (a legal ask) assigns precincts and resolves duplicates.

• What is asked. Telecom operators compute, for each Aadhaar-linked subscriber, the dominant night-time location over the trailing 180 days. They return only a polling-part code (or a short list of candidate parts) and a pattern flag: stable, seasonal, moved or split. No tower logs, timestamps or trajectories leave the operator.
• Why. Aadhaar and roll addresses lag real moves by years. Mobile is the only signal that is both near-universal and current.
• Accuracy limits. The subscriber is not always the user: a SIM in a husband's name is used by his wife, a parent's SIM by a student. Tower location is coarse (hundreds of metres in dense cities, kilometres in rural areas) so in cities it narrows the choice to a few parts and the address decides. With several SIMs, use the Aadhaar-linked number with most night-time activity. People with no phone or a shared phone fall back to declaration and records.
• Rule of use. Mobile location can raise a prompt and break a tie between records.
• Legal basis needed. No current law lets ECI obtain subscriber location for roll maintenance; the Telecommunications Act 2023's disclosure powers are framed around public safety and emergencies. The ask is an amendment to the RP Act 1950 (or rules under it) that names the derived field, limits its purpose to the roll, deletes it after each revision, provides for audit, and lets anyone opt out to declaration-only. The derived-only, opt-out design is what makes the use defensible under Puttaswamy; expect it to be challenged regardless.

The Second Ask: presuming citizenship from residence records

The electoral-roll problem exposes a citizenship-status problem that cannot be solved by demanding documents from people who were never documented. Parliament therefore must decide whether sufficiently long, continuous state-recorded residence should create a rebuttable presumption of citizenship.

A one-time legal presumption should treat a long, continuous record history in India as citizenship, so that the the least-documented adults (likely the most vulnerable) are not pushed into exception processes to find documents that were never issued.

• What is asked. A rule under the Citizenship Act or the RP Act 1950: an adult with continuous, independent records in India for a set period, and no adverse immigration record, is presumed a citizen for electoral registration. The presumption is rebuttable only by evidence, with the burden on the state. The threshold is 12 years, matching the residence Section 6 already requires for naturalisation, counted from the person's own first record across at least two independent sources.
• Scheme age is not record age. Aadhaar, NFSA and Jan Dhan are all 12 or more years old, but each person's history starts at their own enrolment. Jan Dhan grew from 14.72 crore accounts in 2015 to 59.09 crore in 2026, so most accounts are younger than the scheme. UIDAI and the other custodians can count exactly how many adults clear 12 years from enrolment dates; that is the pilot's first query.
• The trade-off. It will include some long-resident people who entered without documents and have no immigration record. At a 12-year threshold this is in substance a regularisation: it grants by presumption what Section 6 grants by application, without Section 6's other conditions, including renouncing another nationality (India does not allow dual citizenship). That is the policy choice Parliament makes; the counterweights are that the presumption is rebuttable and the immigration-record check still runs.
• What it changes. People with long record histories move from T2 and T3 to automatic inclusion with no doorstep check, and anyone who clears the threshold no longer needs to be matched by name to pre-Aadhaar documents. The pilot measures how many people move.
• Carve-out. Assam is governed by Section 6A of the Citizenship Act (the 25 March 1971 cut-off) and the NRC process and needs separate treatment.

Adverse evidence

Immigration records are the one source that can show someone is not a citizen, so they are the one source allowed to trigger review. A verified match to a foreign national's visa, FRRO registration or OCI card goes to the ERO as a referral. Exit records for Indian citizens work the other way: someone living abroad is still a citizen, so they are routed to overseas-elector registration under Section 20A of the RP Act 1950.

Coverage estimates

An estimated 85-96 crore adults (83–94%) resolve from data alone; 9-15 crore need outreach. These are planning ranges built from the source coverage above, not measurements. The system, as it pilots and deploys, will replace these estimates with actual data.

Tier	Evidence state	Est. adults (crore)	Who is typically here	Action
T1 Established	Documentary anchor on self or parent: legacy roll, passport, CRS birth, school certificate, MHA grant	60–68	Settled households; most urban middle class; under-26s with birth records	Auto-confirm; pre-filled Form 6 or EPIC confirmation
T2 Corroborated	No direct anchor, but family edge to a T1 citizen, or 10+ years of independent multi-source records from childhood	25–28	Rural households with ration and MGNREGA histories; older adults born before birth registration	BLO confirms at doorstep; no document demand
T3 Incomplete	Aadhaar plus short or fragmented footprint; no family edge	8–12	Inter-state migrants, women who moved at marriage, urban informal workers, nomadic and denotified tribes, transgender persons, care-leavers	Welfare-first outreach
T4 Unlinked	No Aadhaar, or records that cannot be linked	1–3	Homeless people, remote forest and hill habitations, people with severe disability, elderly without family	Welfare-first outreach, in person

Migrants and Duplicates

Migrants

The roll's largest accuracy error is location, not citizenship: people still registered where they used to live, and the same person registered in two places. Mobile-derived home location is the one source that shows where a person sleeps now, so the design uses it for the precinct, subject to the legal ask below.

Three kinds of movers need three different answers. "Migrant" covers people whose ordinary residence has not changed and people whose residence has.

Pattern	What the data shows	Ordinary residence (RP Act s.20)	Engine action
Seasonal migrant anchored to home (brick kilns, sugarcane cutting, construction seasons)	Night-time location returns to the home cluster every year; family stays on the home ration card	Home: temporary absence does not end ordinary residence	Keep the home entry; no prompt to shift; tell them polling dates in advance
Settled mover still registered at the old place	Night-time location in the new place for 6+ months with no return; ration drawn there; children in a new school	New place	One-tap prompt to shift (Form 8); the old entry closes as part of the transfer
Split or ambiguous (weekly commuters, households split between village and city)	Two clusters, neither dominant	Person's declaration	Ask; the declaration wins

The 6-month threshold and the "returns every year" test are proposals for the pilot to calibrate.

One person, one entry. Sections 17 and 18 of the RP Act 1950 bar registration in more than one constituency or more than once in one. Duplicates arise because a new Form 6 does not close the old entry. The fix:

1. Find them. Dedupe all state rolls on the Aadhaar key, with photo and demographic similarity matching for entries not linked to Aadhaar.
2. Pick the right one. Keep the entry that matches current ordinary residence: the declaration first, then mobile home location, then other records.
3. Close the other as a transfer. The person is told by SMS and has 30 days to object. They lose their second entry, never their vote.
4. Stop new ones. Every new Form 6 checks the national index and becomes a shift, closing the old entry in the same transaction.
5. Offer an amnesty. Duplicates surrendered in the first cycle face no action for false declaration under Section 31.

Duplicates

Duplicates show up as overlapping networks. Two Aadhaar numbers that share a phone, a bank account, a PAN and household members are probably one person. The overlap is a referral to UIDAI's biometric deduplication, which is the decisive check.

Reaching the unlisted: welfare first

The people in T3 and T4 are thin in the data because they are thin in the state's services, so the first visit offers them services, not scrutiny. Each enrolment also generates the independent, dated records that later support their voter registration — the welfare visit is the evidence-building visit.

Who visits. People the household already trusts: ASHA and anganwadi workers, SHG members under DAY-NRLM, and the Booth Level Officer as part of the same team, not alone. In cities, add ward offices, labour unions and NGOs working with construction, domestic and gig workers. Each team carries Aadhaar, banking and CSC enrolment kits.

The visit, in order:

1. Ask what the household lacks. A checklist screens for each scheme below.
2. Enrol on the spot in whatever the household is eligible for and missing.
3. Fix the records that will matter later: late birth registration, the woman's address moved from her natal to her marital home, the child's school record linked.
4. Offer voter registration last, with Form 6 pre-filled from what was just gathered. Declining is fine and recorded only as "not now".
5. Close the evidence gap with help, not demands. The team identifies which accepted document is nearest to hand and helps obtain it; free legal aid from the District Legal Services Authority covers anyone who needs a certificate or an inquiry.
6. Return in 90 days to deliver cards and finish what is pending.

What the team can enrol people in:

Programme	Gap it fills	Record it leaves
Aadhaar enrolment or update	T4 has no identity key	Identity; current address
Late birth registration (RBD Act)	Adults born before universal registration	Birthplace and parents — the core Section 3 fact
NFSA ration card; One Nation One Ration Card for migrants	Food security; portability	Household composition; residence
PM Jan Dhan account	Direct benefit transfers	Dated KYC; continuity
e-Shram registration	Informal and migrant workers	Occupation; work location
Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY	Health cover	Household listing
PM Ujjwala LPG connection	Clean cooking fuel for women	Woman-held, address-linked record
NSAP old-age, widow and disability pensions; UDID card	Elderly, widowed and disabled adults	Age, residence, disability status
Transgender certificate (national portal)	Identity in self-identified gender	Identity document that matches the person

Rules that keep it compassionate

• No citizenship questions at the door. The team records facts: birthplace, parents, years at the address. The engine and the ERO apply the law later.
• Language and dignity. Scripts in the local language, women team members for women-headed households, and home visits for the elderly and disabled.

Safeguards and governance

The two errors are not symmetric: wrongly removing a citizen takes away a constitutional right, while a non-citizen on the roll is a vote that the existing objection process can catch. The safeguards are weighted accordingly.

Safeguard	Mechanism
Proportionality (Puttaswamy)	Only fields needed for the Section 3 test and residence are queried; location only as a derived home-location code computed inside the operator, never raw telemetry; no religion, caste or income fields
Federation, not aggregation	Custodians answer yes/no attestations through a consent layer on India Stack (DigiLocker, Account Aggregator pattern); ECI holds results, not source data
Purpose limitation (DPDP Act 2023)	Attestations are usable only for electoral registration; logs record every query
Transparency to the person	Tier and reason codes visible on the Voter Helpline app; one-tap correction request
Public reason-coded statistics	Every addition and removal published by part, with reason, so parties and civil society can audit before the roll is final
Independent audit	A random sample of T3/T4 people is visited by an independent team each cycle to measure how many were eligible citizens
Disparity monitoring	Gender ratio, age-cohort and SC/ST-reserved-constituency coverage tracked by district; a district breaching thresholds pauses removals

 

Sources

•         UIDAI enrolment dashboard — 145.32 crore Aadhaar generated, updated 28 Sept 2026

•         Special Intensive Revision (Wikipedia) — Phase I and II electors and deletions; May 2026 Supreme Court ruling

•         SIR Phase III deletions (SuperKalam, 1 Sept 2026) — over 6 crore names, 17.04%

•         India has 99.1 crore voters (Deccan Herald, Jan 2025) — electors and gender ratio

•         SC directs ECI to accept Aadhaar for Bihar SIR (The Week, Sept 2025) — Aadhaar is identity, not citizenship

•         CRS Report 2024 (Drishti IAS) — 99.1% birth and 99.4% death registration

•         PMJDY at 12 years (Outlook Money) — 59.09 crore accounts

•         Ration card deletions since 2020 (Outlook) — NFSA 81.35 crore people, 20.29 crore cards

•         TRAI June 2026 subscriber data (TelecomTalk) — 128.2 crore mobile subscriptions

•         PAN–Aadhaar linking (Patrika, 2020) — 50.95 crore PANs allotted

•         Passport is a travel document, not proof of citizenship: MEA (The Goan, June 2026)

•         1.5 crore passports and services delivered in 2025 (News On Air) — about 10% of the population holds a passport

•         The road to DILRMP 3.0 (The Week, Aug 2026) — 99.81% of records of rights computerised; 37 crore+ Bhu-Aadhaar parcels

•         New immigration rules mandate biometric data of foreigners (Tribune) — Immigration and Foreigners Act 2025 and its rules