Bengaluru Electorate Shrinks to 56.11 Lakh as Draft Rolls Delete Over 1 Crore Names

Bengaluru's registered electorate dropped sharply from 1.03 crore to 56.11 lakh voters following the publication of the draft electoral rolls by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Karnataka, on August 24. Statewide, the draft roll saw the deletion of more than 1.07 crore names.

Voters whose names have been marked under the Absent, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead or Others (ASDDO) categories can apply for inclusion by filling out Form 6. The claims and objections period is scheduled to run from August 24 to September 22.

In addition to the deletions, election authorities are issuing 43.8 lakh notices across Karnataka to voters flagged for logical discrepancies or those who could not be mapped to the 2002 electoral rolls. A significant share of these notices—24.05 lakh—is concentrated in Bengaluru.

Booth-level officers (BLOs) are conducting door-to-door visits to deliver the notices. BLOs will make up to two attempts to serve each notice, which may be handed to a family member or a neighbour if no family member is present. Each notice contains the reason for issuance, the assigned officer's name, the date and venue for a hearing, and a QR code allowing voters to submit documents online.

Recipients are required to appear in person for hearings conducted by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) or Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs), even if their documents are submitted online. If a voter misses the scheduled hearing, it will be rescheduled only once. Hearing venues include government premises near polling stations, police stations, or gram panchayat offices.

The publication process also faced technical glitches during its initial release. Heavy traffic caused website crashes in some constituencies, while users reported corrupted English language files, error messages, and instances where download links delivered HTML files instead of PDF documents.