BOOTH RATIONALISATION LANDS A HARD BLOW ON VOTERS

WHEN Tamil Nadu undertook the onerous task of verification of 6.42 crore voters in just 42 days during the enumeration phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which ended on December 14, 2025, it also carried out a major parallel exercise of 'booth rationalisation', as instructed by the Election Commission of India (ECI).

- PON VASANTH B A @Chennai

This exercise had the objective of limiting the number of electors per polling station to 1,200 by increasing the number of polling stations in the state from 68,467 to 75,035. However, rationalisation has muddied the hurried SIR process on three crucial fronts.

The most significant consequence is that it has made it harder for voters not on the draft rolls to find their names on deletion lists.

Similarly, Booth Level Agents (BLA-2) of political parties, who are best placed to identify dropped voters, are struggling to help electors due to the rationalisation. Finally, the exercise has considerably obscured the true extent of deletions at the booth level.

When TN went to Lok Sabha elections in 2014, the state had 5.38 crore voters across 60,418 polling stations. A decade later, during the 2024 polls, the electorate had grown by 15.9% to 6.24 crore. Polling stations, consequently, went up to 68,144, an increase of 12.8%.

A year later, the SIR has reduced the state's electorate to 5.44 crore at the end of the draft phase-a 15.2% fall that almost completely offsets the growth since 2014. Yet, polling stations have increased 10%, bringing down the average electors per booth from 936 pre-SIR to 725.

While the net increase in booths is only around 6,500, the polling station numbers - the 'part number' by which a booth is known-has changed for over 52,500 booths. Another 12,200 booths have been bifurcated, 567 trifurcated, and about 111 have seen their areas split across four to six booths.

Take polling station 50 in Chennai's Harbour Assembly constituency. It had five sections covering streets in the Seven Wells area, with 1,434 electors before the SIR. In the rationalisation, this got bifurcated with three of these sections becoming booth 52 and two becoming booth 53. Before the SIR, these numbers denoted entirely different booths.