If your name has been deleted from the voter list

Start on the Election Commission's Electoral Search service and run the search twice, in two different ways. Search by EPIC number first, because that is the field least likely to have been altered. Then search by name, relative's name, age and district, because a transcription change in the name — an initial expanded, a surname moved, a spelling regularised during digitisation — will make the second search work when the first fails, or the reverse. A single failed search is not evidence of deletion.

Then check the roll for your part rather than the search index. The two are not the same thing and they do not always agree. Andhra's Chief Electoral Officer pointed people at both online databases and the notice board of the local electoral office to find out what had happened to a removed entry, which is a useful reminder that the authoritative record during a revision is the published part list, not a search box.

Look for transposition before you conclude deletion. A large share of apparent disappearances are entries that moved — a new part was carved out of an overcrowded one, a house was re-mapped to a different polling station, or a serial number was renumbered. The Commission has told states that no polling booth should exceed 1,200 electors, and every time that ceiling forces a part to be split, a set of electors changes part number without anything happening to their entitlement.

Use the Commission's own channels rather than a third-party site. The Commission publishes the Voter Helpline app on Google Play, and Form 7 and the other roll forms are filed through the Voters' Service Portal or the ECINet app. Sites that offer to check or fix your entry for a fee have no role in the process and no access to anything you do not have.

Call 1950 with your STD code prefix and ask the specific question: is the entry deleted, and under what ground. The helpline can put you in contact with your Booth Level Officer, and the Booth Level Officer is the person who holds the field record — the enumeration form, the visit notes, the marking that says shifted or absent. That record is what an appeal will turn on, so it is worth knowing what it says before you write anything.

Finally, print or screenshot what you find, with the date visible. If you later appeal, the fact that your name was absent from a particular published roll on a particular date is something you will need to assert, and the roll will have been superseded by then.

The first is an objection filed by another person. Form 7 is the objection to an entry, and it may be filed by the elector themselves or by any other elector in the constituency. Analysts have noted that it requires the applicant's name, EPIC number and phone number and the target's details, that it offers a fixed menu of grounds — death, under age, permanent shifting, duplicate entry, or not a citizen — and that no supporting document has to be attached at the point of filing.

The second is a marking made during house-to-house verification. When a Booth Level Officer visits and finds nobody, or finds that the family has moved, the entry can be proposed for deletion as shifted or absent. The Commission has directed that Booth Level Officers visit a household up to three times during an intensive revision, but a person who works away from the address during the day, a student in a hostel, or a migrant worker back in the village is exactly the elector that three daytime visits still miss.

The third is a duplicate purge. Anyone who registered afresh after moving city, without getting the old entry removed, has two entries in the system, and de-duplication drives resolve that by removing one — not necessarily the one you would have chosen. Andhra's draft roll alone accounted for 7.37 lakh entries as duplicates. Duplicate registration is itself an offence, so this category is worth cleaning up on your own initiative rather than leaving to an algorithm.

The fourth is a death report. Deaths are reported by families, by Booth Level Officers and through registration data, and mismatched names within a household — a father and son with the same name, two members with the same relative's name — are the classic route by which a living person is recorded against a deceased person's entry.

The fifth is the revision itself. In a Special Intensive Revision, the roll is rebuilt rather than edited, and the draft roll carries the names of those whose enumeration form was received and processed. If your form did not reach the officer, or reached it and could not be matched, your name is absent from the draft — which is not, formally, a deletion order at all, but has exactly the same effect on polling day if you do nothing about it.

The categories matter because each has a different answer. A wrong death entry is corrected on evidence you can produce in an afternoon. A shifted marking is contested with proof of ordinary residence. An absence from a draft roll is answered with a fresh claim inside the claims and objections window, not with an appeal against an order that was never passed.

This is the part of the law that gives you leverage, and it is stated at the highest level. The Election Commission has said publicly that no name can be deleted from a draft electoral roll without notice and a speaking order of the Electoral Registration Officer or Assistant Electoral Registration Officer, and that any elector aggrieved by a decision of the ERO can appeal to the District Magistrate and to the Chief Electoral Officer thereafter. Live Law reported the Commission giving the Supreme Court the same assurance about prior notice.

The mechanics under the Registration of Electors Rules 1960 are a sequence, not a single act. A Form 7 objection goes to the Electoral Registration Officer or Assistant Electoral Registration Officer, who issues a notice to the elector named in it, allows a period to respond — described as seven days — offers a hearing, has the Booth Level Officer verify in the field, and only then passes an order. The rules also require the registration officer to exhibit the list of names proposed for deletion, with notice of the time and place at which the question will be considered.

Two consequences follow that are worth being direct about. If you received no notice, the procedure was not followed, and that is the point your appeal should lead with rather than an argument about the merits. And if you did receive a notice and ignored it — an envelope from the electoral office is easy to mistake for a circular — then the order was regular, and your route is a fresh claim rather than a complaint about process.

It is also worth knowing what Form 7 cannot do. All India Radio News reported the Commission's position that no deletion of any vote can be done online by any member of the public: filing the form online starts an inquiry, it does not remove anybody. The same report gave the Aland, Karnataka figures — of 6,018 Form 7 applications, 24 were found genuine and 5,994 were rejected — which is a useful illustration of the inquiry stage actually working, and of the Commission registering criminal cases where a pattern of bogus objections emerged.

The weakness in the system is at the front door rather than the back. Commentators have noted that Form 7 needs no evidence at the time of filing and that there is no reliable check that the EPIC number and phone number given actually belong to the applicant, so a bulk attack on a roll is easy to launch and is generally caught only at the officer's inquiry rather than at submission. That is precisely why the notice you are entitled to matters: it is the mechanism by which the inquiry finds you.

Ask for the file. A written request to the Electoral Registration Officer, or a Right to Information application if that is ignored, should produce the notice said to have been served, the record of the hearing, the Booth Level Officer's report and the order itself. Moneylife's account of deleted electors in Maharashtra makes the same point — the documents behind a deletion are obtainable, and their absence is itself the case.

If your name is absent from a draft roll published under a revision, the answer is a claim inside the claims and objections window. Andhra Pradesh's Chief Electoral Officer put it plainly: genuine electors can still be added back during the claims and objections period using Form 6 along with the prescribed declaration form. That declaration is specific to the revision, so download it from the state Chief Electoral Officer's site or the Voters' Service Portal rather than reusing a form from a previous cycle.

Form 6 is also the form when the deletion is old, when you have moved to a different Assembly constituency since, or when you would rather be enrolled quickly than argue about an order passed two revisions ago. It is a fresh enrolment with a fresh field verification, and it carries the same conditions as any enrolment — citizenship, age on the qualifying date, and ordinary residence at the address you claim. The site's separate guide to registering covers the enrolment conditions and the verification visit in full.

Form 8 is the wrong form for a deletion but the right one for the near-miss cases. If the entry is present but wrong — a name transcribed badly, a wrong relative's name, a wrong age, a wrong photograph — or if you have moved within the same constituency, Form 8 corrects or transposes the existing entry and keeps its history. Using Form 6 where Form 8 was needed is a common way to create the duplicate that gets you purged next time.

Form 7, counter-intuitively, is sometimes yours to file. If the reason your good entry was removed is that a stale entry in a constituency you left is competing with it, the clean fix is to have the stale entry deleted deliberately, by you, rather than leaving the system to choose. It is also the form a family uses to remove a deceased relative's entry, which prevents that entry being used and prevents household name mismatches later.

None of these applications costs anything. All are free on the Voters' Service Portal and all can be filed on paper with the Electoral Registration Officer or handed to a Booth Level Officer. Keep the acknowledgement reference number the portal issues; it is the only handle you have on the application afterwards, and it is what a grievance or an appeal will refer to.

Gather the residence evidence before you file, not after. A registered rent agreement, a utility bill or a gas connection in your name at the address, a bank statement or passbook showing the address, and any document tying you to the household will each do work at the verification stage. In an intensive revision the Commission has treated Aadhaar as an identity document but not as proof of domicile or citizenship, so an Aadhaar card alone will not settle a question about where you ordinarily reside.

Section 24 of the Representation of the People Act 1950 creates a two-tier appeal in plain terms. An appeal lies, within such time and in such manner as may be prescribed, to the district magistrate or additional district magistrate or executive magistrate or district collector or an officer of equivalent rank, from any order of the electoral registration officer under section 22 or section 23; and thereafter to the chief electoral officer, from any order of the district magistrate or the additional district magistrate under that first clause.

That structure is what distinguishes a deletion from a rejected application in practice. Section 22 is the correction and deletion power the Electoral Registration Officer exercises over an existing entry; section 23 is inclusion. An order under either is appealable, so the officer's decision to strike your name is reviewable by a named civil authority who does not report to the electoral machinery for this purpose, and the Chief Electoral Officer of the state sits above that.

The periods are prescribed rather than written into the section, and they are stated in the revision's own announcements. Doordarshan News, reporting the Commission's second-phase Special Intensive Revision schedule covering the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, described appeals to District Magistrates after publication of the final roll with a further appeal to the state Chief Electoral Officer available within fifteen days. Treat the fifteen-day window as the working assumption and confirm it against your state's notification, because the schedule for each revision is published separately.

An appeal must be in writing and must attack something specific. Name the order — its date, the ground recorded, the part and serial number of the deleted entry — and set out either that no notice was served on you, or that the notice was answered and the finding is wrong on the evidence. Attach the residence proof, the identity proof, and the deletion record if you have obtained it. Appeals are accompanied by the prescribed fee, and the fee is not refundable whichever way the appeal goes.

Appeal and re-application are not alternatives you have to choose between. Filing a fresh Form 6 protects your position if the appeal is slow; the appeal is what establishes that the deletion was wrong, which matters if the same ground is applied to you again next revision, and which is the only route that can restore an entry rather than create a new one. Where a deletion has been challenged in court, timelines have been imposed — Moneylife records the Bombay High Court accepting a thirty-day reinstatement period for affected electors — but a court is a last resort, not a first move.

If the order came out of a revision and the final roll has already been published, the appeal is the live remedy and the claims window is closed. If the roll is still at draft stage, both are open at once, and the claims route is almost always faster.

This happens more than the Commission's systems admit, and it strands people at the polling station. The published part list held by the presiding officer is the operative document on polling day. If the portal shows you as enrolled and the printed roll does not, the printed roll wins on the day, which is why a portal screenshot taken a week before an election is reassurance rather than protection.

Work the escalation in order, because each level asks whether you tried the one below. The Booth Level Officer holds the part and the field record and can identify whether an entry was transposed or deleted. The Electoral Registration Officer for the Assembly constituency is the statutory decision-maker and the only person who can pass an order. The District Election Officer, usually the District Magistrate, supervises the machinery for the district. The Chief Electoral Officer of the state sits above all of them and is the office that answers for the roll as a whole.

Put it in writing at the point where it stops being a conversation. A verbal complaint at a counter leaves no record and cannot be escalated. A dated letter or portal grievance naming the discrepancy — the part number, the serial number, the search result, the date of the roll you checked — creates the paper trail that the next level needs, and starts the clock on any timeline your state publishes for grievance disposal.

The Right to Information route is under-used here and it works. An application to the Electoral Registration Officer's public information officer asking for the notice served before deletion, the record of the hearing, the Booth Level Officer's verification report and the copy of the order will either produce documents that show the procedure was followed, in which case you know what you are arguing against, or produce nothing, in which case the absence is your appeal. The site's separate guide to filing an RTI covers the mechanics and the fee.

Keep the 1950 helpline for facts rather than remedies. It is the fastest way to establish what the system currently says about your entry and to be connected to a Booth Level Officer, but it cannot pass or reverse an order, and treating a helpline reference number as a substitute for a written application is how people arrive at an election with nothing to show.

If several members of one household or one building have gone at once, say so explicitly in the complaint. A pattern of removals from a single part is treated differently from an individual grievance, and it is the pattern that triggered the Commission's inquiry and criminal complaints in the Aland case.

An intensive revision is not an edit of the existing roll. It is a rebuild, directed by the Commission under its statutory power to order a special revision of the roll for a constituency or part of one, and it runs to a published timetable of enumeration, draft publication, claims and objections, notices and hearings, and final publication. Everything you can do about a missing name is anchored to that calendar, and the calendar is set state by state.

The second-phase schedule reported by Doordarshan News is a fair model of the shape. Enumeration through early December, draft rolls published on 9 December 2025, claims and objections from 9 December 2025 to 8 January 2026, a notice phase of hearings and verification running to 31 January 2026, and the final roll on 7 February 2026. The gap between the close of claims and the final roll is the notice-and-hearing period — the window in which the Electoral Registration Officer is supposed to be dealing with your objection rather than sitting on it.

Those dates move, sometimes substantially, and you cannot plan on a schedule you read once. In Uttar Pradesh the Commission first announced a draft roll on 6 January 2026 with claims and objections to 6 February and a final roll on 6 March. All India Radio News then reported the claims and objections period extended to 6 March 2026 after political parties asked for more time, with disposal of applications by 27 March and the final roll pushed to 10 April 2026. Andhra Pradesh, on a later phase, ran claims and objections from 31 July 2026.

State variation is not a footnote on this subject; it is the operating fact. Different states are in different phases at any moment, the draft roll and the final roll fall on different dates in each, the appeal authority is your own District Magistrate and your own state Chief Electoral Officer, and the prescribed declaration that accompanies a restoration claim is issued by the state. A procedure described accurately for Uttar Pradesh will be wrong for Kerala in the same month.

The practical rule is to find out which phase your state is in and what date closes next, and to work backwards from it. If claims and objections are open, file the claim now and treat everything else as secondary. If the final roll has been published, the claims route has closed and the section 24 appeal is what remains, on the short prescribed period. If enumeration is still running, the priority is making sure your enumeration form is received and matched, because that is what puts you on the draft in the first place.

One thing that does not vary: an entry cannot be restored on polling day. Whatever the state, the roll used at the polling station is the one that was published, and there is no counter at the booth that can add a name. Everything on this page has to be done before the roll is finalised for the election you intend to vote in.

Assuming the card is the entitlement. An elector photo identity card in your pocket proves nothing if the roll does not carry your name, and the reverse is also true — the Commission notifies alternative photo documents accepted at the polling station for each election. Checking the card is not checking the roll, and it is the check almost everybody does.

Checking only once, and only at election time. Rolls are revised continuously and intensively, and the interval between your last check and the next revision is where a deletion happens quietly. A search that took a minute in January is worth repeating when a draft roll is published in your state, which is the moment removals become visible and the moment the claims window opens.

Ignoring the envelope. A notice from the Electoral Registration Officer is the safeguard the whole structure rests on, and it arrives as ordinary post or as a visit from the Booth Level Officer. Responding inside the period stated — described as seven days — and attending the hearing is far cheaper than appealing an order that was passed regularly because nobody answered.

Filing the wrong form. Form 6 where Form 8 was needed creates a duplicate; Form 8 where the entry has been deleted has nothing to correct; Form 7 filed carelessly against a relative's entry removes a live voter. Each of these takes a revision cycle to unpick.

Leaving the old entry standing after a move. It is the direct cause of the duplicate purge, it is an offence to be registered in two places, and the entry the system keeps may not be the one you use. Removing it deliberately with Form 7 in the old constituency is a five-minute job that prevents a category of deletion entirely.

Paying somebody. There is no paid route into the electoral roll, no agent with access to the Electoral Registration Officer's system, and no fee for Forms 6, 7 or 8. The only prescribed fee anywhere in this process is the one that accompanies a section 24 appeal, and it is paid to the appellate authority, not to a facilitator.