Mizoram launches month-long drive to verify, update electoral rolls after SIR

Mizoram has launched a month-long special drive to verify and update electoral rolls following the completion of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a senior election official said on October 1.

Chief Electoral Officer Zarzosanga said the exercise, part of the continuous enrolment and updation process following the SIR, will continue throughout October.

As part of the drive, Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Booth Level Officers (BLOs) will compare the newly published SIR electoral rolls with the pre-SIR rolls for their respective polling stations.

Where names have been deleted from the revised rolls, BLOs will personally verify the cases and record the reasons for the deletions, he said.

The election department has received 3,840 appeals from voters following the publication of the SIR rolls, with Lawngtlai district accounting for the highest number at 1,679, the CEO said.

A total of 78,442 names were removed from Mizoram's electoral rolls during the SIR exercise conducted from May 20 to June 28 and culminating in the publication of the final rolls on September 7.

Before the SIR, Mizoram had around 8.75 lakh registered electors, all of whom were provided enumeration forms. Of these, 8,28,906 forms were collected, while 46,162 remained uncollected.

The names of voters whose forms were not collected were subsequently deleted before the publication of the draft electoral rolls on July 4.

A further 32,280 names were removed from the final rolls, which contained around 8.35 lakh electors, including approximately 4.32 lakh women, officials said.

The Election Commission had earlier said the objective of the SIR was to ensure that no eligible citizen was left out of the electoral rolls while preventing the inclusion of ineligible persons.

The CEO's office has made the final SIR roll, appeal-related services and electoral roll search facilities available through its official website.