New Delhi: Electoral entries of prominent voters in New Delhi assembly constituency who received notices during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) have been validated and parked for inclusion in the final electoral rolls after district poll officials verified their details and supporting documents.Those who received SIR notices included former Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar, BJP veteran L K Advani, external affairs minister S Jaishankar, Delhi ex-chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, former deputy CM Manish Sisodia, senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Kapil Sibal, foreign secretary Vikram Misri, former NITI Aayog vice-chairperson Arvind Panagariya, BJP MLA Kailash Gahlot, former army chief Gen Upendra Dwivedi, CBI director Praveen Sood and Delhi’s ex-lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung, among several other names from bureaucracy and politics.SIR notices to ‘VIP voters’, as they are usually referred to by election officials, had attracted attention earlier this week over why their names had been flagged during the roll revision exercise.“Based on the details provided in the enumeration forms, the entries for these voters were identified either in the list of logical discrepancies or as unmapped in the last SIR,” said an official, adding, “Consequently, according to the standard operating procedures of Election Commission of India, notices were issued to the electors as part of the verification process. The cases were then examined individually. In most cases, election officials contacted the voters, collected the required details and documents and completed the verification.”The list of voters in Delhi who have been identified for serving of SIR notices includes 33 lakh people across its 70 assembly constituencies. The SIR notices are issued by election officials and delivered physically to the voters by booth-level officers (BLOs). “The dispatch of the notices began from Aug 31; most of the voters have received the notices,” said an official.The Delhi poll panel must complete the disposal of all the notices by Oct 29 because the publication of the final SIR rolls is scheduled for Nov 4. The responses to the notices can be submitted online as well as offline by visiting assistant electoral registration officers (AEROs), whose details and time of visits are mentioned in the SIR notices.The office of Delhi’s chief electoral officer has clarified that receiving an SIR notice by itself does not mean that a voter’s name will be deleted from the rolls. Rather, it provides an opportunity for the elector to submit the required information and documents before a decision is taken on the entry.
