Delhi’s draft voter roll publication moved to August 31 as booth reshuffle continues

Delhi’s draft electoral roll will be published on August 31, a week later than planned, because the city’s polling-station reshuffle is still unfinished.

The Election Commission approved the revised schedule after Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Ashok Kumar sought more time to complete the exercise. The final electoral roll is now due on November 4. Residents will be able to file claims and objections from August 31 to September 30; notices and disposal of those claims are scheduled to run until October 29.

The revision requires polling stations to be brought down from a limit of 1,500 electors to 1,200. Officials must identify booths above that threshold and shift voters to an existing nearby station or a newly created one. The draft roll cannot be issued until that rearrangement is complete.

Booths still being reorganised

Across Delhi’s 13 districts, 5,480 of 13,033 polling stations were found to have more than 1,200 electors. Rationalisation has been completed in Northwest, Outer North and North districts, but nearly 270 polling stations remained pending across 15 Assembly constituencies as of Monday.

Those constituencies include Sangam Vihar, Dwarka, Matiala, Palam, Krishna Nagar, Laxmi Nagar and Karawal Nagar. Officials have been asked to submit revised proposals showing the tentative number of voters expected to remain at each booth after the deletion of voters placed in the ASDDO categories — Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Others.

Who will appear in the draft roll

At the end of door-to-door enumeration, 97.5 lakh of Delhi’s 1.45 crore voters, or 67.2%, were set to appear in the draft roll. More than 33 lakh of those entries are either unmapped or carry data anomalies.

Another 47.7 lakh voters classified as uncollectable under ASDDO will not be included in the draft roll. Delhi’s earlier SIR enumeration figures had put the proposed exclusion at 32.8% of the electorate. The list of voters in the ASDDO categories is expected within two days.

Space constraints in dense localities

Electoral Registration Officers are also looking for additional rooms to house polling stations. The task has proved difficult in unauthorised colonies such as Sangam Vihar, where population density is high but government schools and community centres are limited.

Political parties must approve newly identified polling stations before the changes are finalised. Earlier, 443 polling stations seeking exemption from the rationalisation exercise were asked to revisit their proposals and resubmit them.