ECI oversees the voter roll for parliamentary and assembly elections while the SEC does so for panchayat and municipal elections.
The panchayat voter list was revised independently but in parallel with the ECI voter list.
Seema Devi of Udaipur’s Malvi constituency is declared dead by the ECI but living on her panchayat roll.
{{cta-block}}Where the ECI’s Dead Vote in PanchayatWe found that the highest number of ECI’s ‘declared dead but ready to vote in Panchayats’ were in Garhi assembly constituency.
In Garhi, 4,889 voters found dead through ECI’s self-proclaimed purity exercise were declared valid and alive voters by the state commission for panchayat elections.
New Delhi: The left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. In Rajasthan, around 8.75 lakh people were declared “dead” by the Election Commission of India (ECI) during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
But the Rajasthan State Election Commission (SEC) has found that 1.82 lakh of these ‘dead’ voters are alive and has granted them the right to vote in the ongoing panchayat elections.
SIR, the ECI’s voter roll ‘purification’ exercise, was carried out between October 2025 and February 2026. It led to the net deletion of nearly 32.31 lakh voters. In December 2025, Rajasthan’s State Election Commission (SEC) also announced a revision of the Panchayat’s electoral roll.
They are two separate authorities. ECI oversees the voter roll for parliamentary and assembly elections while the SEC does so for panchayat and municipal elections. The voter rolls maintained by the two are distinct, but logically, they should both have the same voters on it.
The Collective compared SIR’s Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD) list with the Panchayat’s electoral roll. We found 1,82,440 citizens who were marked dead after the ECI’s SIR were alive on the Panchayat's electoral roll.
The panchayat voter list was revised independently but in parallel with the ECI voter list. The exercise by ECI was completed on February 21, 2026 and four days later the SEC also completed its exercise.
We accessed, downloaded and analysed both these databases in October this year. By this time, the citizens had already begun polling for their Panchayats in a four-phased election. Voter lists are locked before voting begins.
The ECI voter lists have been updated after the draft stage and on a monthly basis even after the SIR was completed but these updates are small in number. We could not review data from these updates because ECI does not provide clarity on whether it changes voter IDs of those it once declared dead and deleted if they are subsequently brought back on the database as living.
Seema Devi of Udaipur’s Malvi constituency is declared dead by the ECI but living on her panchayat roll.
For the analysis, we carried out a two-step verification to confirm that the 1.82 lakh people declared dead by ECI exist on the state panchayat voter roll. We took their voter IDs and the EPIC numbers from the ECI’s database and ran through the panchayat roll. Once we found them on the panchayat roll, we ran a second test to check a sample of these against a parallel portal that the state commission maintains. This portal pops up the individual voters’s details when an EPIC number is entered.
The disparity between the two voter list revisions is more egregious because both the lists were revised in parallel. A substantive time gap between the two could have given either the ECI or the SEC an excuse to claim things had changed on ground in the interim.
The panchayat draft roll was published after the ECI had already declared who it had found to be dead, shifted, absent or duplicate and removed them from the central list.
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Where the ECI’s Dead Vote in Panchayat
We found that the highest number of ECI’s ‘declared dead but ready to vote in Panchayats’ were in Garhi assembly constituency. In Garhi, 4,889 voters found dead through ECI’s self-proclaimed purity exercise were declared valid and alive voters by the state commission for panchayat elections.
We did not carry out a ground-verification to say which of the two commissions was right. Similarly, in Sirohi constituency, our analysis showed 4,624 ‘dead’ voters living on the state commission’s updated voter roll.
Top 10 constituencies where those alive have been marked dead by the ECI.
All these now, if they truly are alive, would be able to vote in the Panchayats but not be able to vote and elect their Parliamentarians.
For instance, Shalu Doliya, a 26-year-old woman from Ajmer’s Kishangarh assembly constituency, was announced as ‘dead’ in the ASDD list by the ECI. But if Doliya is alive, she retains the right to vote in her panchayat.
The Reporters’ Collective contacted three Booth Level Officers (BLOs). One of them did not speak. The other, a BLO for ECI’s SIR exercise denied there being any of those declared ‘dead’ still being active in the panchayat roll, ‘aesa toh koi nahi hai jiska SIR mein naam kata ho’ (‘There is no such person whose name was deleted from SIR’).
The BLO for Lotiyana Gram Panchayat also refuted this discrepancy and said ‘aesa nahi hai ki delete ho gaye’ (‘It is not the case that voters have been deleted’).
Our analysis proved that both of them were wrong.
We sent detailed queries to the ECI and Rajasthan’s SEC on discrepancies in the voter list that remain unanswered.
