Around 64.5 lakh electors are potentially missing from the final electoral rolls of Karnataka released after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise on Tuesday, October 27, based on the Elector-to-Population (E-to-P) ratio of 66.11 released by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO).
The State's E-to-P ratio is the ratio between the total number of electors on the rolls and the estimated 2026 population across all age groups, including those below 18 who are not eligible to vote.
The population estimates were based on the 2020 Report of the Technical Group on Population Projections, constituted by the National Commission on Population and widely used by government agencies.
The Hindu used the same report's estimates for different age groups to arrive at the figure.
Karnataka's population as of March 1, 2026 should be around 6.89 crore, of which 5.19 crore should be eligible to vote. Had all eligible voters been included, the rolls would hold roughly 5.19 crore names. The final rolls have only 4,54,55,689 electors (excluding Service Electors), a shortfall of about 64.5 lakh.
The 18 to 29 age group accounts for the majority of those missing. Of the 64.5 lakh, 38.41 lakh (59.5%) are in this group, calculations showed.
Karnataka had 5.54 crore electors before the SIR began. Of the 1.08 crore names deleted during the enumeration phase, only 23.5 lakh (21.8%) were removed as duplicates and deceased. The remaining 78.2% were deleted with "shifted" or "absent" marked as reasons. Only 8.2 lakh net additions were made during the Claims and Objections phase.
Overall, 99,32,303 electors were deleted, bringing the count down from 5,54,32,314 to 4,55,00,011.
Bangalore Urban saw the steepest fall, from 40,21,039 electors to 24,01,939. In BBMP South district, the number dropped from 21,44,784 to 11,13,554. BBMP North and BBMP Central also recorded large deletions.
Belagavi, Mysuru and Kalaburagi each lost 1-2 lakh electors, about 5 lakh in all, while Udupi, Chamarajanagar and Kodagu saw the fewest deletions. Officials said most of those deleted in these three districts were migrant labourers.
Of more than 43.82 lakh notices generated due to logical discrepancy and no mapping, at least 1,88,324 names were deleted from the final roll, CEO V. Anbu Kumar said on Tuesday.
Hearings were held in all cases: 43,20,957 names were retained, while 61,867 were marked ineligible on grounds including acquiring foreign citizenship and being unreachable during hearings.
Another 1,24,327 Form 7 applications were auto-generated when voters applied for a change of residence through Form 8, to remove their names from previous addresses.
After the draft roll, 1,091 more voters were identified as dead, and 184 names were deleted after voters were marked absent during the notice phase.
Foreign nationals
Identifying foreign nationals was among the stated aims of the country-wide SIR, but in Karnataka, as in other states, the number of foreign nationals was never publicly released by ECI officials.
Kumar said the number was "less than a thousand" and that the process of identifying them was still under way. He did not provide an exact count.
However, according to a Times of India report, the ECI found 716 foreign nationals, most of whom were Nepalese or people of Indian origin who now held the citizenship of another country.
Special drive for deleted voters
Election officials have decided to take a fresh look at data from areas where deletions were high and the number of electors changed drastically.
A senior Election Commission official said constituencies, wards and booths with large differences will be picked for verification, and head-office data will be compared with ground reports. Apart from independent inquiries, information will be sought from Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and District Election Officers (DEOs).
The Election Commission has also directed all officials to hold special drives and set up camps in the coming days to enrol eligible electors who were left out.