SIR Odisha 2026 has removed more than 20 lakh names from the state’s voter list, the Election Commission confirmed this week, triggering a sharp political row. The draft rolls, published on July 5 after a month-long door to door revision, now show 3.13 crore voters, down from 3.33 crore before the exercise began.
The numbers are big. But behind every deleted name is a real person, and in many cases, a real question mark over whether that deletion was fair.
What the CEO Odisha Saying?
Odisha’s Chief Electoral Officer R S Gopalan explained the drop in plain terms. Of the 20.12 lakh names removed, 8.32 lakh belonged to deceased voters. Another 10.07 lakh people had shifted elsewhere or were simply absent when booth level officers came calling. A further 1.58 lakh were flagged as duplicate entries registered in more than one place. Around 14,000 voters never returned their enumeration forms at all.
“The objective is inclusion of all eligible electors and exclusion of all ineligible electors,” Gopalan said, adding that safeguards are in place so genuine voters are not left behind. He said 93.97 percent of the state’s pre-revision electorate submitted their forms, and nearly 1.98 lakh fresh voters were added during the same exercise.
BJD Alleges 27 Lakh Voter Exclusion in SIR Odisha 2026
Not everyone is convinced by the official arithmetic. The opposition BJD says the real deletion figure is closer to 27 lakh, not 20.12 lakh, a gap of about 7 lakh names that the party wants explained. BJD leader Debi Prasad Mishra alleged that more than 10,000 voters were excluded in each of 75 assembly constituencies, and over 15,000 in 49 others, calling this a sign of “procedural complexities” and poor BLO training rather than genuine cleanup.
Congress Called It “Conspiracy” Against Anti-BJP Voters
Congress has gone further. Legislature party leader Rama Chandra Kadam called the deletions a “conspiracy,” alleging that voters seen as unfriendly to the ruling BJP were disproportionately dropped. BJP MLA Babu Singh pushed back sharply, saying the Election Commission revised the list, not the party, and that anyone with a grievance should “submit claims through proper channel.”
How The SIR 2026 Voter List Process Actually Works?
This is where the SIR 2026 voter list system gets complicated for ordinary people. SIR stands for Special Intensive Revision, a nationwide door to door verification drive that is far more thorough than the routine annual updates most voters are used to.
Instead of just adding new 18 year olds and removing the deceased on paper, BLOs physically visit every household to confirm who lives there. If a name has gone missing, the process to get it back is fairly specific. Voters can file a claim through their local BLO, the ECINET mobile app, or the portal voters.eci.gov.in. This must be done along with a declaration form and supporting documents before August 4. Objections will then be examined by the electoral registration officer, and the final roll is due on September 6.
Gopalan was clear that no name disappears without process. “No name can be finally deleted without due notice and a reasoned order by the electoral registration officer,” officials said, adding that aggrieved voters retain a right to appeal under the Representation of the People Act.
How Many SIRs Are Completed & In Which States?
SIR Odisha 2026 is part of Phase 3 of the nationwide revision, covering 16 states and 3 Union Territories including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Jharkhand and Manipur.
Phase 1 covered Bihar in 2025, and Phase 2 covered nine states and three Union Territories including West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh are yet to get their schedules, mainly due to weather and pending census work.
Manipur, also in Phase 3, has deleted around 1.6 lakh names, a smaller number but a proportionally larger share of its electorate. It gets complicated further because of ongoing ethnic conflict which displaced roughly 60,000 people who cannot easily return home to verify their addresses. The Election Commission says displaced voters have been accounted for, though civil society groups remain doubtful.
The Gap Between Rules On Paper And Life On The Ground
Filing a claim sounds simple on paper. For a daily wage labourer in a remote district, travelling to an ERO office can mean losing an entire day’s earnings, just to fix a spelling mistake or a missed form. For someone living hand to mouth, that is not a small ask.
Women face a related but different problem. Many women who move to their husband’s village after marriage end up with mismatched addresses across their Aadhaar, ration card and old voter ID. Aadhaar itself does not help as much as people assume here. It is accepted as identity proof but not as citizenship proof under SIR rules, which leaves many poor voters, who often have no other formal document, unsure of exactly what to submit.
District wise figures released alongside the draft roll show Ganjam recording the highest number of deletions at over 2.07 lakh, followed by Cuttack with about 1.55 lakh, both districts with large numbers of migrant workers who move for work and can be harder to verify at a fixed address. Some local reports also point to unusually high deletion rates in tribal border pockets like Malkangiri, though officials have not yet given a district by district breakdown explaining the pattern, and the picture across smaller districts remains unclear.
With only 147 EROs handling claims from over 20 lakh affected voters before September 2, the arithmetic works out to roughly 13,695 cases per officer in less than a month. Whether that is enough time and staff to fairly hear everyone remains an open question.
SIR Odisha 2026: Why Does This Controversy Feels Bigger?
The BJD ruled Odisha for 24 uninterrupted years before losing power to the BJP in 2024. Odisha’s voter rolls swelled by nearly 45 lakh names between 2014 and 2024, despite comparatively slow population growth. This is the gap that has fuelled long standing suspicion of ghost or duplicate entries accumulating quietly over successive governments. Critics note that the BJD, now raising alarm over the scale of deletions, also presided over the period when the rolls grew unchecked.
At the same time, opposition parties argue that a cleanup conducted under a BJP led Election Commission, deserves extra scrutiny rather than less. This is because Odisha went to the polls in May 2024 using a roll of 3.33 crore names, out of which 20 lakh names are now declared ineligible.
Controversial SIRs That Reached Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has already upheld the broader legal validity of the SIR exercise itself. In May 2026, it mentioned in its ruling that SIR falls within the Election Commission’s constitutional mandate. But that has not stopped state specific disputes. West Bengal’s SIR has already seen fresh legal challenges over deleted names exceeding past victory margins in some seats.
And whether Odisha’s numbers eventually reach the courts too may depend on:
1. What the claims and objections process turns up before the September 6 deadline, and
2. If India ever builds a continuous system to stop ghost entries from quietly building up all over again in the years that follow!