What explains poll panel’s obsession with the word ‘Special’? What is SSR?

• The Election Commission on 29 September announced a special drive to re-enlist voters left out by SIR. On 15 October it announced a ‘Special’ Summary Revision of electoral rolls in states where SIR has been completed. The final list after SSR is to be published on 4 January, 2027

• Why hold a SSR before correcting the errors evident in the SIR, asked TVK and DMK in Tamil Nadu. SSR is designed to repair some of the damage done by SIR and address the concerns of leaders like Yogi Adityanath who believe 1.27 crore ‘Hindu voters’ have been left out in Uttar Pradesh by SIR

• On 12 November the Election Commission published SSR draft rolls for several states, which diverge significantly from the number of voters in post-SIR electoral rolls with substantial additions and deletions

Most people have stopped making sense of the Election Commission of India’s announcements. The electoral roll revision, which used to be a fairly simple and straight exercise, has been turned on its head and made complicated. The use of the prefix ‘special’ (Special Intensive Revision/ Special Summary Revision) has allowed the ECI to shift the goal posts, change, chop and revise rules at a bewildering frequency. The centralised and digitised dashboard and fancy algos have flagged logical discrepancies. It has made confusion worse confounded. Nobody seems to know what is legitimate and what is not or what sinister motive is dictating decisions.

Take the Special Summary Revision (SSR) of electoral rolls. The ECI announced on 15 October 2026 that SSR would be carried out in 17 states and UTs where SIR had been completed, including in Bihar and West Bengal. The SSR was to be carried out in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand as well. Strangely, the final electoral rolls after SIR are yet to be published in many of these states and as many as 37 lakh ‘appeals’ remain pending before extra-Constitutional appellate tribunals in West Bengal, for which there is no legal sanction in statutes.

Earlier, on 29 September the ECI had announced a special drive to re-enlist voters who were left out. This re-enrolment through special camps and house-to-house visits by booth-level officers (BLOs) was to be done using the original Form 6, without the declaration appended during the SIR. In Summary Revisions and now in the Special Summary Revision, unlike the SIR, applicants do not have to submit documents to prove citizenship or be mapped with earlier electoral rolls.

On 5 November, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the annual special summary revision (SSR) of electoral rolls for six more states and/ UTs comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu, Mizoram, Odisha and Sikkim.

These measures implicitly admit that the SIR was flawed and electoral rolls riddled with errors. The SSR appears to be designed as a face-saving measure to control as much damage as possible. The SSR will not only enrol newly eligible voters who attain the age of 18 on 1 January, 2027 but also older voters erroneously or mischievously left out by SIR. By dispensing with mapping to older rolls and logical-discrepancy checks, it concedes that the SIR’s insistence on them was unnecessary.

The SSR also raises suspicion because it comes in the wake of UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath publicly complaining that SIR had deleted 1.27 crore ‘Hindu voters’ in the state. Is SSR timed to address his concerns? One cannot say it with certainty but the exercise reeks strongly of ineptitude. Representatives of several political parties including TVK and DMK in Tamil Nadu had walked out of a meeting in Chennai last month to brief them on SSR. When errors made in the SIR were yet to be corrected, they felt, SSR was not necessary. First correct the errors and re-enrol those left out by SIR, they said.

For poll-bound states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Manipur, Goa and Uttarakhand, however, the SSR provides an opportunity to repair the truncated rolls prepared by the SIR. Those wrongly deleted have a fresh opportunity to be re-enrolled, without getting flagged by “logical discrepancy” checks or citizenship tests. Political parties need to insist that the ECI must publish re-enrolments (after deletion) separately from fresh enrolments.

The ECI had skipped the annual summary revision of electoral rolls in 2025 on the plea that since SIR was underway, it was not needed. Annual summary revisions are routine exercises which typically start in October and enrol new voters attaining the minimum age for voting on 1 January of the subsequent year. The rolls are also published as a matter of routine every January. However, since the exercise was not undertaken in October, no revised roll was published. The SIR was supposed to do the trick and enrol all eligible voters.

Why then have the summary revision in 2026, when the SIR process is still underway? Why call it the ‘Special’ Summary Revision? What is special about it?

What is even more extraordinary, on 12 November 2026, Thursday, the Election Commission published the draft rolls, which is a ‘routine’ exercise, explained ECI officials. Summary Revisions do start with a draft roll and then invite voters to challenge and file for corrections. The corrected and revised rolls are to be published on 4 January, 2027. What is extraordinary is that the draft roll published on 12 November show both deletions and additions in the final rolls published after SIR or Intensive Revision in the case of Assam.

In Bihar, for example, the media reports hold that 13 lakh voters have been added to the post-SIR figure of 74.2 million voters in the state published in November, 2025 before the election. Since the annual revision was skipped, from where did this figure crop up? Media reports quoting Election Commission’s communication point to two lakh deletions and four lakh additions to the final roll published post-IR before the assembly election in the state earlier this year. Similarly, 43 thousand voters had been added in Goa, 33, 700 in Manipur  and 0.4 million in Keralam.