Donald Joseph Rego (61) had no reason to prove that he was alive. Until the draft electoral roll published on August 24 under the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) told him otherwise.
The 61-year-old from Mangaluru South constituency’s Bejai discovered his name was missing from the draft rolls and was listed instead under the “dead” category of the Absent, Shifted, Duplicate, Dead and Others (ASDDO) list.
What looks like a database exercise on paper is increasingly being worked out in homes, government offices and hearing centres, where voters are searching for old certificates and trying to understand why records they considered settled have suddenly become questions. The questions have also reached voters whose electoral participation is relatively recent. Also Read I Nearly 1.1mn Delhi voters’ names deleted from January 2025 to June 2026, before SIR began Over 4.3 million voters have received notices over discrepancies in their electoral records so far under the exercise, which is currently in the claims and objections phase. The hearings began across the state on September 5 and will continue until September 23. Also Read I Over 3.64 million SIR notices issued in Karnataka yet to reach voters
The discovery kicked off a series of fruitless visits to election officials, said Rego. “I kept going from one office to another, and instead of taking responsibility, the officials kept directing me to someone else,” he said, alleging that the assistant electoral officer (AERO) blamed the booth-level officer (BLO), who in turn told him to speak to the data entry operator who had uploaded the information through the SIR mobile application.
