Supreme Court issues notice on Maharashtra SIR as 2.07 crore voters are left off the draft roll

A bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant sought responses from the Centre and the Election Commission on 26 October 2026 and listed the matter for 5 November. Articles 324 to 326, the 1950 Act, Rule 21A and Lal Babu Hussein explained.

A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Monday, 26 October 2026, issued notice to the Centre, the Election Commission of India (ECI) and others on a petition challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maharashtra.

Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana were also on the bench, which listed the matter for hearing on 5 November 2026. The petition was filed by Arun Anandagiri, a chartered accountant and journalist by profession.

What the petitioner told the Court

Senior counsel Arvind Datar, for the petitioner, said voters who had relocated temporarily during redevelopment in Mumbai and Pune had been deleted as "person not found".

Datar told the bench that around 20 million of the 97.9 million voters in Maharashtra have been deleted from the draft rolls. Another 12.2 million electors, he said, have been struck off under "logical discrepancies".

The petitioner asked the Court to keep the SIR in the State in abeyance until the issue is decided. He also asked that no voter whose name appeared in the pre-SIR list be deleted.

The Chief Electoral Officer's figures

The office of the State Chief Electoral Officer gave its own numbers. Of 97,854,049 registered voters across Maharashtra, it said, 20,688,487 electors, or 21.14 per cent, have been excluded from the draft electoral rolls because they could not be traced at their given addresses during the SIR exercise.

Who controls the rolls

Article 324(1) vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of the electoral rolls in the Election Commission. M.P. Jain, in Indian Constitutional Law, explains, citing Dr B.R. Ambedkar's speech in the Constituent Assembly, why one all-India body was preferred. A State government could otherwise exclude outsiders from the rolls.

Article 325 provides one general roll for every territorial constituency and bars exclusion on grounds only of religion, race, caste or sex. Article 326 makes every citizen aged 18 or more, who is not disqualified, entitled to be registered as a voter.

Article 327 lets Parliament legislate on elections, including the preparation of rolls. The Court has called the right to vote a statutory right, a view M.P. Jain criticises. He argues that Article 326 gives it a constitutional basis.

The 1950 Act and the 1960 Rules

The Representation of the People Act, 1950 governs the rolls. Section 21 deals with their preparation and revision, and Section 21(3) lets the Commission order a special revision at any time, for reasons recorded, in the manner it thinks fit.

Section 22 allows an Electoral Registration Officer to correct or delete an entry that is erroneous, or belongs to a person who has ceased to be ordinarily resident or is otherwise not entitled to be registered. Its proviso requires a reasonable opportunity of being heard before action is taken.

Appeals against the officer's orders lie under Section 24, first to the District Magistrate and then to the Chief Electoral Officer.

Section 20 of the Act, which defines ordinary residence, says a person who is temporarily absent from the place of ordinary residence does not cease to be ordinarily resident there. The submission about voters relocated during redevelopment engages that provision.

The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 supply the procedure. Rule 21A covers deletions proposed before final publication of the roll. The officer must prepare and publish a list of electors proposed for deletion, with a notice of the time and place at which the question will be considered.

Affected persons may file objections, oral or written, which must be considered before a decision. Where the ground is non-residence or ineligibility, the elector must, as far as practicable, get a reasonable opportunity to show cause.

Lal Babu Hussein on deletion without notice

In Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer ((1995) 3 SCC 100), the Supreme Court dealt with an officer who asked residents of an area to prove their identity en masse. It quashed the notices because they failed to separate existing voters, who had voted several times, from new ones, and held that a large-scale presumption of illegality is impermissible.

M.P. Jain reads the case to mean that a name already on the roll cannot be removed for want of citizenship without a reasonable opportunity of being heard. Aditya Sondhi, in the Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, notes that the Court also asked officers to give weight to a name's earlier inclusion and to pass a speaking order.

Why challenges come at the roll stage

Aditya Sondhi, in the Oxford Handbook's chapter on elections, discusses two older rulings on timing. In Lakshmi Charan Sen v. A.K.M. Hassan Uzzaman ((1985) 4 SCC 689), a Constitution Bench majority suggested it would be difficult to treat the preparation and revision of rolls as part of the election itself for Article 329(b).

In Indrajit Barua v. Election Commission of India ((1985) 4 SCC 722), the Court held that once final rolls are published and elections held, the election cannot be challenged on the ground that the rolls were defective. That bears on the stage at which disputes over rolls can be raised.

The Supreme Court's 27 May 2026 ruling

On 27 May 2026, in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India (2026 INSC 564), the Supreme Court upheld the SIR of the rolls in Bihar in a judgment authored by Chief Justice Surya Kant. It held the exercise traceable to Section 21(3) of the 1950 Act read with Article 324, and found it proportionate.

The Court also described how the Bihar exercise worked. It began with house-to-house enumeration, and Booth Level Officers were to make repeated visits where an elector was not available.

The draft roll then carried the names of electors who had returned enumeration forms. A claims and objections stage followed, in which the officer was to start an enquiry and issue notice wherever eligibility was in doubt.

On deletions, the Court held that an entry's presumption of validity is rebuttable and that Lal Babu Hussein does not bar a systemic revision, because that case arose from adjudication of objections. It also held that the deletions were not contrary to Rule 21A and that notice and hearing were preserved in substance.

The Court described the draft roll as provisional. Non-inclusion in it is not a final deletion but a step before claims and objections, after which a speaking order is passed and an appeal lies. For Bihar voters erroneously deleted as absent, dead, shifted or duplicate, it left judicial review open.

That judgment concerned Bihar. The submissions reported from the Maharashtra hearing do not say which of these provisions the petition relies on.

The matter was listed for hearing on 5 November 2026, and the petition is pending.