Voter verification hits roadblocks as pre-SIR mapping runs into 2002 data wall

Hyderabad: Early signs of friction have emerged in Telangana's pre-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) mapping exercise as voters attempt to verify their details on the Election Commission of India's portal, only to encounter a combination of technical hurdles and historical blind spots.The problems stem largely from the system's dependence on 2002 polling station identifiers, compounded by constituency changes after delimitation, state bifurcation, migration, and spelling inconsistencies in voter names.
At the heart of the issue is the portal's requirement that electors know their place of enrolment and polling station details from 2002 to trace their last SIR records. The difficulty is magnified by the 2008 delimitation, which significantly altered constituency boundaries. Lot of guessworkFor many voters, identifying the exact constituency and booth details from over two decades ago has become an exercise in guesswork. While delimitation itself was a one-time exercise, summary revisions of electoral rolls occur annually, with polling station names and numbers changing over time. Expecting electors to recall a precise polling station number and name from 2002 is being widely flagged as unrealistic. Migration has added another layer of complexity. Voters have moved from Andhra Pradesh and other states to Telangana, shifted between booths within the same constituency, relocated across city constituencies, or migrated across state borders altogether—making backward tracing of electoral records even harder. Spelling mismatchesFor those unable to proceed using polling station details, the portal offers a name-based search. However, the 2002 SIR rolls available online are transliterated from Telugu to English, leading to frequent spelling mismatches. Minor variations can result in no matches being displayed. One commonly cited example is ‘Sudhakar' failing to appear unless entered as ‘Sudhakara'. The process has also been complicated by the removal of a previously available door/house number search option, which electors say made verification quicker and more intuitive. Without it, name searches often return hundreds of similar entries, turning verification into what many describe as a laborious and impractical task. Political parties have urged the ECI to reinstate the door number search facility, arguing that it would simplify verification, improve voter confidence, and make the digital process more inclusive. They contend that the information revealed through a door number search is already accessible via name searches and does not pose additional security risks. Technical constraintsAnother technical constraint flagged is the cap of 100 records in name-search results, despite only two mandatory fields—state name and elector's full name as per the 2002 roll. Parties have sought removal of this cap to ensure all relevant records are visible. At the field level, verification is being carried out through ERO Net/ECI Net, with BLOs and BEO-level officers using apps to search records, link rolls, and flag doubtful cases involving similar names or surname variations. Addressing migration-related gaps, chief electoral officer C Sudharshan Reddy said there are issues due to migration, and that new BLOs were given access to other states' SIR rolls as well, which will help, and that people can search on ECI Net.