The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Friday released the draft electoral roll of Bihar in the context of the Special Intensive Revision-2025 and at the same time launched an all-encompassing voter awareness campaign.
The effort plans to engage both citizens and political parties in a joint initiative to see the final list reach 100% accuracy.
Part of the process involved the ECI distributing both hard and electronic copies of the draft list—without voter photographs—to all the listed political parties. These were meant to assist the parties in examining and suggesting deletions or additions, a senior official confirmed.
In voter outreach literature circulated throughout the state, the ECI declared, "All the voters of Bihar are hereby informed that the draft voter list under Special Intensive Revision-2025 has been published on August 1, 2025."
To enable people's access and examination, Bihar Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) has arranged special camps from Saturday, August 2. The camps will continue until September 1, and the camps will be functioning every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at all block-cum-zone offices and special urban locations, such as Executive Officer offices and municipal corporation zones.
In an official communication to political parties, the office of the CEO informed that the draft list can be accessed on its website. It added, "Besides this, the list of such draft former voters, who have failed to submit the counting form and whose name is not in the draft electoral list, 2025, is also being made public."
The letter requested parties to help establish mistakes and file claims or objections concerning entries on the draft roll. Parties were requested to cross-verfiy the information from the data against the cut-off date of eligibility, which was July 1, 2025.
The draft electoral list released on August 1, 2025, should be closely watched based on the eligibility date of July 1, 2025… All the political parties are hereby requested to closely check the draft electoral roll and in case the name of any eligible/qualified individual is not present in the draft electoral roll, then in such a case the concerned individual should be motivated by the political parties to approach the BLO/Assistant Electoral Registration Officer/Electoral Registration Officer along with the declaration form in Form-6 and required documents," the ECI stated.
The Commission also cited constitutional and legal provisions in its appeal for assistance: "It is requested that in terms of Article 326 of the Indian Constitution and Sections 16 and 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, required cooperation should be extended to add the names of all eligible persons in the electoral roll and delete the names of ineligible/ineligible persons from the electoral roll so that 100 per cent correctness of the voter list can be ensured," read the letter.
In anticipation of wider examination, the ECI also started making arrangements for releasing sample draft electoral rolls for all 90,817 polling stations in Bihar.
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