How to register to vote

The conditions are set by the electoral law and are short. You must be a citizen of India, you must be 18 years of age or above on the qualifying date, you must be ordinarily resident in the constituency where you seek registration, and you must not be disqualified from registration.

Ordinary residence is the condition that generates the most confusion. It is not the same as owning property and it is not the same as being temporarily present. A person who has moved for work or study and genuinely lives in a place is ordinarily resident there; someone who visits a family home occasionally is not ordinarily resident there merely because their belongings are.

Since the change to four qualifying dates, an eligible person may apply in advance of turning 18 and be registered with reference to the next qualifying date after they attain that age. This ended the situation where a person turning 18 shortly after a single annual date effectively waited nearly a year to be enrolled.

Registration in more than one constituency is not permitted, and it is an offence to be registered twice. If you have moved and registered afresh, the old entry should be removed rather than left standing — that is a Form 7 in the old constituency, and doing it properly protects you.

Non-resident Indian citizens who have not acquired another citizenship register through a separate form as overseas electors, with reference to the address in their passport, and vote in person in that constituency.

Members of the armed forces, central armed police forces and certain government servants posted outside India register as service voters through their own route, along with their spouses, and the entitlement follows the service posting rather than ordinary residence.

There is no requirement to hold a ration card, an Aadhaar card, a property document or a caste certificate to register. The documents required are proof of age, proof of the address you claim as ordinary residence, and a photograph.

Check first whether you are already on the roll. The electoral search service lets you search by name and details or by EPIC number, and it is worth doing before anything else — duplicate applications create their own problems.

Gather the documents: proof of date of birth, proof of ordinary residence at the address you are claiming, and a recent passport-size photograph in the specified format. The list of acceptable documents is published on the portal and includes ordinary household documents rather than anything exotic.

Register on the Voters' Service Portal with your mobile number and email, and verify with the one-time password.

Choose Form 6 — the application for a new elector, also used when you have moved to a different constituency and need to be enrolled there.

Complete the form: your name as it should appear, relative's name, date of birth, present ordinary residence, and the constituency and part number where known. Take care with the spelling of your name; correcting it afterwards is a separate application.

Upload the documents and the photograph, review carefully, and submit. Note the reference number the portal gives you.

Track the application on the portal. Your application goes to the Electoral Registration Officer for the constituency, and a Booth Level Officer normally makes a field visit to verify that you ordinarily reside at the address.

Cooperate with that verification. A field visit that finds nobody at the address is the commonest reason an application stalls, and the officer is not obliged to keep returning. If you are out during working hours, arrange for someone to be present or contact the officer.

Once accepted, your name appears in the roll and an elector photo identity card is issued. The digital version can be downloaded from the portal, and the physical card is delivered separately.

This is where people most often use the wrong form and lose months. The distinction is whether you have moved within the same constituency or to a different one.

If you have moved to a different Assembly constituency — a different city, a different state, or simply across a constituency boundary — you apply afresh with Form 6 in the new constituency. That is a new enrolment, with the same verification process, and it does not happen automatically.

If you have moved within the same constituency, that is a change of address on an existing entry and is dealt with under Form 8, which also covers correction of entries, replacement of a card, and marking an elector as a person with disability. The separate form that used to exist for shifting within a constituency was merged into Form 8.

Either way, deal with the old entry. Leaving a stale registration in a constituency you no longer live in is how duplicate entries accumulate, and duplicate registration is an offence rather than a harmless leftover.

Form 7 is for objecting to the inclusion of a name, or for seeking deletion of an entry — including a deceased person's entry, which families frequently do not think to remove.

There is no fee for any of these applications. All are free on the portal, and can also be submitted physically to the Electoral Registration Officer or through a Booth Level Officer.

Roll revision is a continuous process with periodic intensive revisions, and applications submitted during a revision period are processed against that revision's timetable. Outside a revision, continuous updation applies.

Errors on the roll are common and correctable: a misspelt name, a wrong relative's name, a wrong age, a wrong photograph, or a wrong address within the same constituency. All are dealt with under Form 8, with documentary support for whatever you are correcting.

The elector photo identity card can be downloaded in digital form from the portal once issued, and a replacement for a lost or damaged card is also applied for under Form 8. Losing the card does not affect your right to vote if your name is on the roll — the Commission notifies alternative photo identity documents that are accepted at the polling station for each election.

On Aadhaar: the law was amended to permit electoral registration officers to seek the Aadhaar number of existing and prospective electors for the purpose of establishing identity, and a specific form was introduced for supplying it. Supplying it is voluntary.

The position stated by the government is explicit: no application for inclusion in the electoral roll may be denied, and no entry in the roll may be deleted, because a person is unable or unwilling to furnish their Aadhaar number. If you are told at a counter that registration requires Aadhaar, that is not correct, and the statement above is the answer.

Keep your mobile number registered on the portal current. Application status, verification contact and communications about the roll come to it.

Finally, check yourself on the roll periodically rather than only at election time. Names are removed during revisions for a range of reasons — death, shifting, duplication, or a verification that found the elector absent — and a removal you discover on polling day cannot be fixed on polling day.

First establish the facts. Search the electoral roll by name and by EPIC number, and check the current published roll for your part rather than relying on an old download. It is common for an entry to have moved parts within the same constituency rather than to have been deleted.

Call 1950, the national voter helpline, prefixed by your area's STD code. It is the fastest route to establishing what happened to an entry and who to speak to, and it also supports arranging contact with the Booth Level Officer directly.

If the entry has genuinely been deleted, apply afresh with Form 6 and, where relevant, object to the deletion. Deletions made without notice or without following the prescribed procedure are challengeable, and the first stage is the Electoral Registration Officer.

There is a statutory appeal structure. An order of the Electoral Registration Officer on inclusion or deletion can be appealed to the District Magistrate or equivalent designated authority, and from there to the Chief Electoral Officer of the state. Those appeals have time limits and are worth using rather than simply reapplying.

During an intensive revision, the timetable matters a great deal. Claims and objections are invited during a published period, and an objection raised inside it carries far more weight than a complaint made after the roll is finalised. Watch the announced schedule for your state.

Keep evidence of your ordinary residence available: a rent agreement, utility bills in your name, a bank statement showing the address. Verification disputes are resolved on what you can show the officer, and a person who cannot demonstrate residence at the claimed address will struggle regardless of how long they have lived there.

If you believe an entry has been deleted improperly or that the process was not followed, the appeal route above is the remedy, and the state's Chief Electoral Officer is the office with supervisory responsibility for the roll.