Before UP polls, let’s ask: Does voter list meet criteria of completeness, equity, accuracy

As Assembly elections approach in Uttar Pradesh, a sobering question arises — is it going to be a free and fair election? As it is, the recent elections in West Bengal have cast a shadow on the reputation of India’s electoral system. The fairness of elections in UP raises a range of issues, from “old” ones such as the impartiality of the Election Commission and reliability of EVMs to more recent concerns, including suspicious alterations in the post-SIR voter lists, acceptance of mass deletion requests after the deadline, and the filing of unauthorised Form-7 objections. Here, we focus on the critical issue of “missing voters”.

Uttar Pradesh had an estimated adult population of 16.2 crore as of 1 March 2026. The final SIR voter list, dated April 2026, has 13.4 crore names (down from 15.4 crore pre-SIR). Thus, about 2.8 crore voters seem to be missing, or 17.3 per cent of the adult population. It could even be more, if duplicates or other “surplus names” are still lingering on the final list. The gap is staggering.

UP’s adult population estimate may be a little on the high side due to unanticipated out-migration. If so, the number of missing voters would be correspondingly lower. But there would be more missing voters elsewhere, because the effects of internal migration on population totals cancel out across states. Our all-India estimate of up to 14 crore missing voters (‘Let’s not be in denial — disenfranchisement is real’, IE, October 20) would remain valid. The crisis is real, both within and beyond Uttar Pradesh.

Missing voters fall into two categories: Those who were unfairly deleted from the pre-SIR list (“deleted voters” for short), and those who were missing from the pre-SIR list and are still missing from the final list for lack of inclusion (let’s call them “omitted voters”). The respective proportions of deleted and omitted voters are unknown as things stand.

An omitted voter is no less deprived of the right to vote than a deleted voter, unless it is a case of voluntary non-enrolment. Thus, voter exclusion is not a new phenomenon in India (according to a Lokniti survey, about 7 per cent of adults in 2025 did not have a voter ID). But a sound revision of electoral rolls should reduce, if not eliminate, exclusion. Instead, the ongoing SIR increases it sharply, aside from opening the door to arbitrariness and harassment.

Surjit Bhalla (‘SIR needs reform. But let’s go by numbers, not protestors’ slogans’, IE, October 24) is aware of the figures we have cited so far for UP, but he interprets them differently. He acknowledges that the SIR was carried out in unseemly haste, that it placed an unfair burden of paperwork on poor and migrant workers, that many “logical discrepancy” notices were unwarranted, that there is no evidence yet of claims about removing “infiltrators” and that the ECI’s lack of transparency invites charges of bias. We agree with him on all this. But that still leaves a basic difference on the number of disenfranchised voters.

Bhalla’s interpretation of the figures builds on one critical assumption: If a person is not on the voter list, it is their choice. In other words, all non-enrolment is voluntary. Based on this assumption, Bhalla argues (in his Substack ‘Much ado about [almost] nothing’, October 17) that “the right benchmark for a clean roll is not 100 per cent of adults but 100 per cent less those who do not register”. In other words, a clean roll is an electoral roll with no duplicates, names of dead persons, or other “surplus names”. It does not matter whether the roll covers 50 per cent or 90 per cent of adults, because enrolment is a matter of choice.

According to Bhalla, a “clean roll” (so defined) in Uttar Pradesh would not have more than 13.6 crore voters. Why? Because about 2.5 crore adult persons normally choose not to register themselves on the voters’ list. And where does this figure come from? It builds on Lok Sabha election data for 2024, when nearly 40 per cent of the young adult population (age 18-29) in UP was not enrolled for voting. Bhalla treats this as voluntary non-enrolment, makes an ad hoc allowance for a smaller abstention in the older age group, and concludes that the real shortfall in UP is only 20 lakh (13.6 crore expected minus 13.4 crore actual). We should note in passing that this 40 per cent figure for non-enrolment of the young adult population in 2024 is the highest among all major states, and also much higher than earlier figures for UP itself. If Bhalla had adopted the non-enrolment figure for 2019, for example, his figure for shortfall would have been 93 lakh, not 20 lakh.

The premise of all these calculations — that all non-enrolment is voluntary — is untenable. Only someone who lives under a rock would believe that. The voter ID is a prized document for the vast majority of ordinary Indians, all the more so today when it becomes akin to a citizenship certificate. Thus, any significant shortfall from the adult population is an administrative failure to be examined and rectified. The ECI’s own stated policy is “to ensure that no eligible voter is left out”.

Coming back to the missing voters in UP, here is one further piece of damning evidence. It so happens that another constitutional body, the State Election Commission (SEC), carried out a parallel revision of the voter list of rural Uttar Pradesh around the same time as the SIR. After a thorough revision, involving over 2 crore deletions and additions, the size of the final rural voter list of UP in 2026 is 12.6 crore. Add to this the number of urban voters from the unrevised SEC list of 2023, and you get a figure of 16.9 crore for total voters in UP. This is much closer to the estimated adult population of 16.1 crore than the SIR total of 13.4 crore (all the more so after a small discount for surplus names in urban areas). The Election Commission of India has a lot to explain.

Voter lists are judged by three criteria: Completeness, equity and accuracy. The final SIR list in UP seems to fail on all three counts. There is a massive shortfall which systematically works against women and young voters. And there is mounting evidence of gross inaccuracies. Can such a voter list be the basis of a democratic franchise?

Drèze is visiting professor, Department of Economics, Ranchi University. Yadav is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyan.