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Chennai. Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Archana Patnaik said on Friday that after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the state’s draft voter list now includes 5,43,76,755 voters, of which 2.66 crore are women and 2.77 crore are men. He said that before SIR, there were about 6.41 crore registered voters in the poll-bound state, and due to this process, 97,37,832 names were removed from the voter list. According to Patnaik, the deleted names included 26.94 lakh voters who had died, 66.44 lakh voters who had permanently moved out or migrated, and 3,39,278 duplicate entries where individuals were found registered at more than one place.
He further said that out of those who were marked as migrated, 66,44,881 people were not found at their registered addresses after three rounds of door-to-door verification conducted across the state. The SIR in the DMK-ruled state was carried out amid strong opposition from Chief Minister MK Stalin, whose party had filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the massive role-revision exercise in the southern state.
Criticizing the electoral roll sanitization exercise of the Election Commission, CM Stalin had said, “To stop this anti-democratic move, we called an all-party meeting and passed a resolution condemning the SIR. The Election Commission’s decision to conduct a complete revision of the electoral rolls just a few months before the elections is part of a deliberate strategy to remove legitimate voters.”
