Special Intensive Revision · The form at the door
Not corrected — rebuilt. A Booth Level Officer leaves a pre-printed enumeration form at the address on the roll. Half of it is already filled. The blank half decides whether the name survives.
A revision of the electoral roll normally means corrections at the margin — a few additions, a few deletions, most names untouched. A Special Intensive Revision is a different animal. Under an SIR the roll is rebuilt from the ground up, and every existing elector has to be re-verified against the roll produced by the previous intensive revision. The instrument that does the re-verifying is a single sheet of paper called the enumeration form — गणना प्रपत्र in Maharashtra, printed in the state language wherever you are — hand-delivered by the Booth Level Officer for your part of the roll.
It arrives looking like something you can deal with later. It is not. The mechanics of an SIR are unforgiving in one specific way: a name that is not affirmatively verified does not stay by default. It goes into the deletion list at the draft stage, and getting it back is a claims-and-objections process with a short window and a hearing at the end of it.
The four things to understand before anything else
The form is one per elector, not one per household. Everyone on the roll gets their own. If someone in the house did not receive one, that is not a reprieve — ask the BLO for it by name and serial number.
Half the form is already printed. Name, EPIC number, serial number, part number and name, assembly constituency, address. That block comes from the Commission's database. You do not fill it and you do not correct it there — corrections go on Form 8.
The blank half has one job: to link you today to an entry in the previous SIR roll, either your own or a relative's. That linkage is the entire point of the exercise.
You do not have to be in the country. Any adult member of the household at the address may fill and sign the form on behalf of an elector, noting the relationship. The form says so explicitly.
Two columns, side by side, asking the same set of questions twice.
The left column is your own entry in the previous SIR roll: name, EPIC number if available, the relative's name and relationship as recorded then, district, state, constituency name — and then three small boxes for constituency number, part number and serial number. These are historical figures. They are not on your current voter card; they come from the old roll extract, which the BLO holds and which is also published on the state CEO's site.
The right column is a relative's entry in that same old roll. Same fields again, for a family member who was on it. This is the field most people leave blank, and it is the field the whole design rests on: it is the lineage proof. If your own old entry is thin or cannot be located, the relative's entry is what carries you forward. Leaving it empty because the old EPIC is hard to find is the single most common way a form comes back as a query.
Below the columns, one block per elector: date of birth in boxed digits; Aadhaar, explicitly marked optional; mobile number; father's or guardian's name with EPIC; mother's name with EPIC; spouse's name with EPIC. Then a current photograph pasted in the box at top right — the printed photo stays where it is — and a signature or left thumb impression with the date. The BLO signs a separate line underneath, declaring that the details were checked against the previous SIR roll.
The declaration is not a formality
Signing asserts two things. First, that neither you nor your family has acquired the citizenship of another country. Second, that you are seeking inclusion in this roll only and are not enrolled in any other assembly or parliamentary constituency.
The form itself prints the consequence: a declaration known or believed to be false is punishable under Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 — imprisonment up to one year, a fine, or both. Read both statements before signing rather than after.
This is where people living abroad get needlessly frightened, and where a smaller number get themselves into genuine trouble.
A residence visa is not citizenship. A UAE residence permit, an Emirates ID, a job, a lease and twenty years of living in Dubai do not touch the first declaration. It asks only whether you have acquired the citizenship of another country. On an Indian passport, the answer is no, and the line is signed as printed. Absence from India does not by itself end ordinary residence at a family home you keep and return to.
OCI is a different matter, and the answer is uncomfortable. An Overseas Citizen of India is not an Indian citizen — the name is a courtesy, not a legal status. OCI holders are not eligible to be on the electoral roll. If a name on the roll belongs to someone who has taken a foreign passport or an OCI card, that name must be removed on Form 7. Leaving it there while other members of the household sign the citizenship declaration is exactly the situation the declaration is written to catch.
The second declaration is the one to check properly. Duplicate entries are extremely common and usually innocent — a college registration in another city, an old employer's address, a name added at a spouse's family home and never removed. However it happened, a live second entry makes the declaration false. The remedy is Form 7 against the entry you do not want, filed before you sign, not after.
People abroad who receive an enumeration form usually ask the wrong question. The question is not "how do I vote from here". It is narrower than that.
Whether to remain a general elector at the family address, or convert to an overseas elector under Form 6A. On paper it is a two-way door. In timing it is not: converting in the middle of an SIR means a deletion and a fresh addition, and fresh additions are what go missing.
| Option | What it means |
|---|---|
| A · Stay as you are | Return the enumeration form. Remain a general elector in the same part of the roll. Vote in person at the same polling station. |
| B · Convert (Form 6A) | Register as an overseas elector against the address printed in the passport. Still vote in person — there is no postal, proxy or online ballot for overseas electors. No EPIC card is issued; you vote on the original passport. |
| C · Do nothing | Form unreturned. The name enters the deletion list at the draft roll. |
Is there a duplicate entry anywhere else? It decides whether the declaration you are about to sign is true. Cheap check: search the Voters' Service Portal by EPIC, and again by name with the father's name, five minutes per person.
When exactly does this revision's window close? The claims-and-objections period is set per revision and has been revised more than once. Cheap check: ask the BLO for the date in writing when you hand the form over, and confirm it against the state CEO's site.
Option A, for anyone already on the roll. Form 6A is designed for citizens abroad who are not yet enrolled. If you are already enrolled and the family home is still the family home, returning the enumeration form is both the smaller task and the safer one.
The strongest case against it: if you have genuinely stopped being ordinarily resident at that address and nobody there could answer for you at verification, the entry is exposed and Option B is the honest route. That risk is real — and it is still smaller than voluntarily deleting a live entry in the middle of an intensive revision. The default stands.
The enumeration form only covers people already on the roll. Everyone else needs one of five forms, and which one is not a matter of judgement — it follows from the situation.
| Situation | Form |
|---|---|
| 18 or over, living at the address, never registered | Form 6 — new enrolment |
| Turning 18 shortly (17+) | Form 6 in advance — enrolled on the next qualifying date: 1 January, 1 April, 1 July or 1 October |
| Adult abroad, Indian passport, never registered | Form 6A — overseas elector, against the passport address |
| Died, moved away, or acquired foreign citizenship / OCI | Form 7 — deletion |
| Wrong spelling, date of birth, photograph or address | Form 8 — correction |
| Under 18 | Nothing yet |
Do this before filing anything. Run every member of the household through the Voters' Service Portal. Five minutes each. It tells you precisely who is on the roll, who is missing and who is sitting on a duplicate — and that list, not guesswork, decides which forms you need. Filing before checking is how one person ends up with two entries and a Form 7 to unwind it.
Documents each new applicant needs
All of these can be filed online at voters.eci.gov.in or through the Voter Helpline app, or on paper to the same BLO. During an SIR the BLO usually carries spare Form 6 copies — ask when you return the enumeration form and save yourself a second visit.
Transliteration between the state language and English is not standardised, and the same surname routinely appears in two or three forms across the roll, the portal and the EPIC card. The rule is simple and it is not "pick the correct one": copy each person's details exactly as they appear on that person's own EPIC card. An invented middle spelling that matches neither document is what turns a routine form into a query.
Draft-roll notices, hearing notices and status updates go out by SMS. Delivery to foreign numbers is unreliable, and a notice you never received is still a notice served. Where the elector is abroad, give an Indian mobile belonging to someone at the address who will actually read it.
Every revision runs on its own published schedule, and this is the part of any guide that goes stale first. For the Maharashtra revision current at the time of writing, the sequence ran: house-to-house verification through 17 August 2026, publication of the draft roll on 24 August, claims and objections from 24 August to 23 September, and the final roll on 27 October 2026. Those dates were revised twice before settling.
Treat that as the shape of the process, not as authority. The only authority is your state's Chief Electoral Officer site and the BLO holding the forms. What does not change is the structure: verification, then a draft roll, then a short window in which a missing name can be claimed back, then a final roll after which the argument is over until the next revision.
Filed is not the same as enrolled
The single most useful habit in this entire process: after the draft roll is published, go and look for the name on the portal. People assume that a returned form means a retained entry. Sometimes it does not, and the only period in which that is cheap to fix is the claims-and-objections window.
That last pair is the whole of your evidence if the name still turns up in a deletion list. It costs ten seconds.
An intensive revision is not an attack on anybody, but it is not neutral either: it shifts the burden of proof onto the elector, and it does so through a piece of paper that looks like an administrative formality. The people who lose their names are almost never the ones who were ineligible. They are the ones who left the right-hand column blank, or assumed a form handed back was a job finished, or were three thousand kilometres away when somebody knocked.
Print version
The whole of the above, condensed to four A4 pages you can print and keep beside the form while filling it — the anatomy of the form, the declarations, the decision framed for electors abroad, the family forms table and the final checklist. Download the A4 guide (PDF).
If you are not yet on the roll and you live in the Gulf, the companion piece covers registration from abroad end to end — Voting from Dubai: Form 6A, the BLO visit, and the airport e-gate.