JAIPUR — As many as 1,82,440 people whom the Election Commission of India (ECI) recorded as dead and removed from Rajasthan's electoral rolls during its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) are still listed as living, eligible voters on the state's panchayat electoral rolls, an investigation by The Reporters' Collective published on November 7 has found.

Source: Maktoob Media (Reporters' Collective investigation)

The investigators matched voter identification numbers from the ECI's list of Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD) voters against the panchayat rolls maintained by the Rajasthan State Election Commission (SEC), and cross-checked a sample of entries through the SEC's voter verification portal. During the SIR, the ECI had categorised around 8.75 lakh people in Rajasthan as dead, out of a net deletion of nearly 32.31 lakh voters from the state's parliamentary and Assembly rolls.

1,82,440voters marked dead by the ECI but listed as eligible on panchayat rolls
8.75 lakhpeople classified as dead by the ECI in Rajasthan's SIR
32.31 lakhnet deletions from Rajasthan's electoral rolls in the SIR
4,889conflicting entries in Garhi constituency, the highest in the state

The investigation cited individual cases, among them Seema Devi of the Malvi constituency in Udaipur, who was marked dead in the ECI's records but remained listed as alive in the panchayat roll, and 26-year-old Shalu Doliya of the Kishangarh constituency in Ajmer, who was declared dead in the ECI's ASDD list. After Garhi, Sirohi recorded the next-highest number of conflicting entries, at 4,624.

Source: Power Corridors

The mismatch is possible because the two commissions keep separate registers: the ECI prepares the rolls for Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, while the State Election Commission maintains the rolls for panchayat and municipal polls, and a deletion by one does not automatically update the other. The two revision exercises ran almost side by side — the ECI completed its SIR on February 21, 2026, and the SEC finished its panchayat revision four days later, on February 25.

What the finding does — and does not — prove

The Reporters' Collective did not ground-verify the status of each of the 1.82 lakh people, so the comparison alone cannot establish how many are actually alive or which commission's record is wrong in each case. What it establishes is that two official registers, revised within days of each other, flatly contradict each other on the same voters.

According to the investigation, detailed questions sent to both the Election Commission of India and the Rajasthan State Election Commission about the discrepancies had not received a response by the time the findings were published.

The findings drew a sharp political reaction on Monday. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, in a post on X tagging the ECI's official handle, alleged that the poll body's 'incompetence and malfeasance seems to know no bounds' — his characterisation of the discrepancy, which the Commission has not publicly answered.

Source: NationPress

What happens next: voters deleted in the SIR can seek inclusion again, and the ECI has separately clarified that filing Form 6 after a name was deleted in the revision will not, by itself, invite prosecution. On November 6, the Commission also gave voters marked ASDD in seven states where the revision is still under way another route back onto the rolls. Whether the Rajasthan mismatch leads to a reconciliation of the two registers now rests with the two commissions.