Maharashtra CEO seeks EC nod for online self-mapping option for voters as pre-SIR exercise falls behind | Mumbai News
4 min readMumbaiUpdated: May 2, 2026 06:37 AM IST As Maharashtra struggles to complete the pre-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) mapping exercise – a time-consuming process that requires Booth Level Officers or BLOs to match every current voter’s name against a 24-year-old electoral roll – the state’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) has written to the Election Commission of India (ECI) seeking permission to allow voters to map themselves online, on the lines of the self-enumeration option introduced for the national census. At present, the pre-SIR activity involves BLOs comparing the 2002 electoral roll with the current one. Every voter’s name must be traceable to the 2002 list to pass scrutiny. Young voters, whose names would not appear in the 24-year-old roll, must show that their parents’ names were on it. The exercise is made more complex by a new category the EC has called “logical discrepancy” under which a voter can be excluded from the roll if, for example, her or her parent’s name appears differently in the 2025 roll versus the 2002 one. The recently …
