EC to begin SIR next week in poll bound TN

Chennai | The Election Commission of India has informed the Madras High Court that the special intensive revision (SIR) of the Tamil Nadu electoral rolls will commence next week along with the states going to face elections.

States across the country including Tamil Nadu, which are facing elections, are set to begin the SIR similar to the exercise in Bihar, in a week, the Commission submitted before a bench of the Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and Justice G Arul Murugan.

During the proposed revision, the commission would take up the complaint raised by the petitioner, former AIADMK legislator B Sathyanarayanan, into consideration, it said when the case seeking a direction to the EC to conduct a complete and transparent re-verification in the 229 booths in T Nagar constituency, came up for hearing on Friday.

The former MLA of the opposition party had moved the high court alleging that the officials in Chennai's T Nagar constituency removed the names of 13,000 AIADMK supporters from the voter list in favour of the ruling DMK.

In the petition, he claimed that while there were 2,08,349 voters in the constituency in 1998, the number of voters increased by only 36,656 in 2021. It has been said that there is a huge difference between the population and the number of voters in the electoral roll.

Further he alleged, "The names of 13,000 AIADMK supporters in the constituency have been removed from the voters list, while the names of deceased have not been removed".

No action has been taken despite petitioning the Election Commission officials in this regard, he said and sought a direction to the EC for a re-verification of voters list in T Nagar constituency before the 2026 Assembly elections, remove incorrect inclusions and release the final voters list.

The bench, accepting the petitioner's request, posted the case to next week, and ordered the EC to file copies of the order issued by the Supreme Court in the case against the Bihar SIR.