Bengaluru: Even illegal immigrants whose names appear in 2025 electoral rolls will receive enumeration forms during Special Intensive Revision (SIR) as booth-level officers (BLOs) say they cannot deny forms to anyone on the existing voter list.Verification of suspected illegal immigrants and other disputed entries begins only after the draft electoral rolls are published. “It is only after the draft list is published, during the claims and objections process between Aug 17 to Oct 15, that discrepancies are examined and forms are scrutinised,” said a BLO from Mahadevapura. Officials mainted the same.Chief electoral officer Anbukumar reiterated, “Those who are in the 2025 roll are given the enumeration forms. And now we are focusing on collecting them back and digitising them.”The issue has acquired significance in Bengaluru, where political parties have alleged the presence of illegal immigrants mainly from Bangladesh on the electoral rolls. The city also continues to lag behind the rest of Karnataka in digitising completed enumeration forms. As of Tuesday evening, Bengaluru had digitised about 45 per cent of the forms, compared with more than 76 per cent across the state.BLOs said their immediate responsibility is to distribute enumeration forms to everyone listed in the 2025 electoral rolls while making efforts to reach genuine voters, who are temporarily unavailable, including NRIs living abroad. Another BLO said two voters in the booth area were currently overseas and were being contacted over the phone to ensure they were not left out of the exercise. “If they do not respond, we will have to classify them under the ‘shifted’ category,” the BLO said.Meanwhile, civic organisation Jagruta Karnataka alleged that several genuine voters had been wrongly classified under the ASDDO category because of the pressure on BLOs to cover nearly one crore voters within a limited timeframe.Dr HV Vasu of Jagruta Karnataka said many such cases involved migrant families living in rented accommodation who frequently changed residences. “Several live in rental accommodation and keep moving over the years, making it difficult to access enumeration forms sent to their previous addresses,” another member of the organisation said.Election Commission officials and GBA functionaries have acknowledged that Bengaluru poses unique challenges for SIR because of its highly mobile population, illegal immigrants and polling booth changes, following the 2008 delimitation.
