CHENNAI: CPI state secretary M Veerapandian on Tuesday accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of launching the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Tamil Nadu without proper planning, after booth-level officers reportedly found many houses locked and residents absent during the door-to-door verification drive.
He said the ECI had commenced the SIR in a “high-handed and impractical” manner, ignoring the State’s working population's everyday life pattern.
He pointed out that in industrial centres such as Tirupur, Vellore, Coimbatore, Erode, Chennai and its neighbouring districts, as well as in Tiruchi and Madurai, most workers and small business owners leave for work by 8 am. “When booth-level officers began distributing voter forms around 10 am on Tuesday, many houses were locked, and eligible voters were unavailable, forcing officials to return without completing the process,” he said.
Booth-level officers were also struggling to verify the names of voters added in previous summary revisions, as the ECI had frozen the 2024 electoral rolls, he said.
Warning that lakhs of genuine voters could be excluded, Veerapandian urged the EC to immediately halt the process and instead conduct a summary revision based on the 2024 list.