Karnataka SIR: Missing 2002 Polling Booth Records Leave Bengaluru Voters Struggling With Verification

The Election Commission's ongoing third round of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Karnataka has left some Bengaluru voters scrambling for answers after they were unable to locate polling booths in the digitised 2002 electoral rolls, raising concerns about the verification process.

The problem has been reported from parts of the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency, where voters are required to establish family linkages using entries from the 2002 rolls. Many residents said polling stations where they had voted for years could not be found on the SIR portal or through the Booth Level Officer (BLO) application.

It has been reported that the voters from areas including Nallurahalli, Whitefield, Hagadur, Immadihalli and Pattandur Agrahara have flagged the issue. Some residents claimed they were unable to find polling booths they distinctly remember voting at before constituency boundaries were redrawn.

Voter activist Mani Nisarga told English daily that multiple polling booths in the constituency appeared to be absent from the digitised records. He claimed efforts to trace some of these booths in neighbouring constituencies also yielded little success.

However, election officials have indicated that historical changes to constituency boundaries may be contributing to the confusion. Following the 2008 delimitation exercise, the erstwhile Varthur Assembly constituency was dissolved and its areas redistributed among neighbouring constituencies. Polling stations were also merged, relocated and renumbered over the years.

Chief Electoral Officer V Anbukkumar told DH that complaints regarding missing polling stations and technical anomalies would be examined. He noted that Karnataka had around 34,000 polling stations in 2002 compared to nearly 59,000 today, making the task of matching older records with current data more complex.

Some voters have also alleged technical issues with the digitised records. They claimed the SIR portal and BLO application displayed a 'No Records Found' message even though their names appeared in physical copies of the 2002 electoral rolls.

Those affected have called for a review of the digitised database and safeguards to ensure that genuine voters are not inconvenienced because of possible data-mapping errors.

Meanwhile, officials have maintained that not all such cases necessarily point to missing records. They noted that some voters were enrolled through special registration drives conducted after the 2002 revision exercise and therefore may not appear in the original 2002 SIR rolls despite voting from the same polling stations in subsequent elections.