By Nageshwar Patnaik in Bhubaneswar, July 5, 2026: More than 20 lakh voters have been removed from Odisha’s draft electoral rolls published on Sunday following the month-long special intensive revision (SIR) exercise. The opposition Biju Janata Dal (BJD) has alleged that SIR has excluded many eligible electors than the Election Commission acknowledges.

The draft electoral rolls, published after a door-to-door verification drive across the state, show that Odisha’s electorate has declined from 3.33 crore (33.3 million) to 3.13 crore (31.3 million), a reduction of 20.14 lakh (2.014 million) voters. This includes 1.60 crore male and 1.53 crore female voters.

Chief electoral officer (CEO) of Odisha, R Sant Gopalan said the deletions were largely on account of deaths, migration and duplicate enrolments, while the BJD claimed the exercise left out around 27 lakh voters and demanded a revision of the draft rolls.

According to the CEO, 8.32 lakh names were removed after the electors were found to be deceased, while 10.07 lakh voters had either shifted from their registered addresses or could not be traced during the verification exercise. Another 1.58 lakh names were deleted after being identified as duplicate entries, while around 14,000 were removed under other categories.

CEO Gopalan said the draft electoral roll had been shared with all recognised political parties.

Voters whose names do not appear in the list can file claims and objections through their Booth Level Officers until August 4. They can also verify their enrolment on the websites of the CEO, Odisha, and the Election Commission of India (ECI).

Gopalan said all claims and objections would be disposed of by September 2, after which the final electoral rolls would be published on September 6. He added that nearly 1.98 lakh new voters had been enrolled during the ongoing revision exercise.

The Opposition BJD has raised concerns over the draft electoral roll, saying more than 10,000 voters were identified for deletion from 75 of the total 147 Assembly constituencies in the state. “Many genuine names were excluded in the draft electoral roll because of minor anomalies, which need to be included during the claims and objection process,” said senior BJD leader Debi Prasad Mishra.

“When the notification for the SIR was issued on May 14, there were 34 million registered voters. However, the CEO has now released a draft list containing only 33 million voters. This means forms have not been collected from about 6% of the electorate. The gap is not 20 lakh as claimed, but rather 27 lakh,” Mishra added.

Mishra further claimed that in some assembly constituencies, as many as 50,000 electors had been marked under “anomalies”.

“If these anomalies are not properly addressed and the process is not simplified, a large number of eligible voters will be excluded from the electoral rolls,” he said.

A total of 147 electoral registration officers (EROs) and 994 assistant EROs have been deployed by the CEO to scrutinise the objections and claims — an exercise to be carried out by September 2. At least 10 senior IAS officers have also been appointed as voter list observers to ensure a transparent, accurate and error-free revision of the electoral roll in the state.