A Booth Level Officer handing over an enumeration form to a resident during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls drive in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
| Photo Credit: K. MURALI KUMAR
With door-to-door visits under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) having begun, voters and Booth Level Officers (BLOs), while filling the enumeration forms, are facing the same problems reported during the voter mapping stage — linking entries to the 2002 electoral rolls and issues related to progeny mapping.Even before the door-to-door visits began, Karnataka had reported more than 91% voter mapping State-wide. However, in many cases, the BLOs and voters said that although mapping had been completed, problems resurfaced when BLOs tried to trace old electoral roll details, with records now not matching.While many people did not remember where they had been enrolled earlier, even the ECI app, which BLOs were using to help voters find the required details, did not fetch the information in several cases.When The Hindu visited a few areas, including Pulakeshi Nagar, Hebbal, and Frazer Town, a common problem highlighted by voters was that the digital ‘Search Your Name in Last SIR’ on the citizen services portal, which is expected to provide basic metadata — Assembly constituency, Part Number, and Serial Number — to help identify a person’s 2002 electoral roll entry, did not give results. In many cases, even the BLOs reported that these details were not generated, making it difficult to trace the old record.People said they were told by the BLOs that this was common in cases where an individual’s or ancestor’s entry had spelling variations or had not been digitised properly. “The search is resulting in a data mismatch error when tried during self-mapping,” a BLO said.While a section of people were aware of the process and reported filling and submitting the form online, many said they did not even know whether they had been mapped. A common concern flagged was that the BLO had not visited their home. “It took less than five minutes to fill the form,” said Mallesh Kumar, a resident of Hebbal. He added that he learnt the process through an ECI video guide and found that filling the form, including linking it to the 2002 electoral roll, was smooth.However, many argued that even when the form was filled out online through the website, the required details did not show up.Another common issue flagged was that many people said the Assembly constituency they currently belong to did not exist in its present form in 2002 because of the delimitation carried out in 2008, while others said their constituency did not show up in the list at all.It was observed that the issue was most pronounced among families that had shifted residence over the past two decades.Moreover, BLOs said that since many of the 2002 electoral records were filled manually, mostly in Kannada, minor changes crept in when they were later digitised, including spelling variations. Many people themselves acknowledged differences in the spelling of their names, the addition of an extra letter, the expansion of initials in one document but not in another, or similar discrepancies in their parents’ records, all of which resulted in “matching” failures and data mismatch errors.Election Commission guidelines state that voters should not withhold the enumeration form just because they are unable to trace their or their relatives’ details in the 2002 electoral roll. The physical form in such cases should be filled, and the BLOs should be informed. Published - July 01, 2026 09:35 pm IST
