Electoral Purge Looms as 10.6 Million Karnataka Voters Face Disqualification Risks

Digitization Failures Trigger Massive Voter Discrepancies

Karnataka's electoral integrity faces a significant challenge as 7.83 million voters fall under the ASDDO classification—covering those who are absent, shifted, duplicate, dead, or otherwise categorized—while another 2.84 million remain completely unmapped. This brings the state-wide total of flagged voters to 10.6 million as of July 28. Officials note that these individuals face potential removal from the rolls or will receive formal notices following the draft publication on August 17.

The crisis is particularly acute in Bengaluru, where 54% of the electorate is either unmapped or flagged under ASDDO. Despite the scale of these figures, digitization efforts for enumeration forms reached only 44% completion by late Tuesday afternoon. The unmapped category alone accounts for 1.88 million voters in the city, many of whom are trapped in administrative limbo because officials cannot link them to 2002 records or verify progeny mapping through relative data.

Missing Records and Localized Instability

Field reports from Booth Level Officers (BLOs) highlight systemic failures in record-keeping. In constituencies such as Bommanahalli, which contains 390 polling stations, data suggests that in batches of 1,500 people, more than 850 are now flagged. In Mahadevapura and Yelahanka, entire polling blocks have vanished from the digitized 2002 electoral archives.

BLOs point to three primary factors for this logistical breakdown:

• The loss or non-digitization of historical supplementary electoral rolls.
• A high volume of internal migration where voters moved residences without updating their registrations.
• Dual enrollment cases where individuals are registered in both Bengaluru and their native districts.

The Categorization of the Displaced

Data indicates that the "permanently shifted" label remains the most common designation, affecting 2.63 million voters across the state. Another 715,000 are listed as absent. Under current protocols, a voter is marked as permanently shifted if they are not present during three separate visits by a BLO to their registered address. While supplementary records for select wards in Uttarahalli and Yelahanka were restored after public complaints, vast sections of the city remain digitally invisible, increasing the risk of valid voters being purged from the system due to technical logical discrepancies.

Source: The Hindu — Cities