The Election Commission of India (ECI) is set to release the draft electoral rolls for Kerala on Tuesday at 3 pm as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. Draft lists for Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands will also be published.

The Commission had earlier revised the SIR schedule for these states and the Union Territory, setting January 1, 2026, as the qualifying date, following requests from the respective Chief Electoral Officers. The final electoral rolls for all nine states — Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal — and three Union Territories — Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep and Puducherry — are scheduled to be released on February 21.

Meanwhile, the Kerala government on Monday requested Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to extend the deadline for submitting SIR enumeration forms by at least two weeks. In the state, the enumeration phase ended on December 18, and updates to the forms were frozen the following day, ahead of the draft roll publication on December 23.

In a letter to the CEC, Chief Secretary A Jayathilak noted that both the Supreme Court and all major political parties in Kerala had sought an extension for submitting enumeration forms. He recalled that on September 18, the apex court had urged the ECI to “sympathetically consider” extension requests from Kerala and Uttar Pradesh.

The Chief Secretary also highlighted several anomalies in Kerala’s SIR process. According to the letter, 24,08,503 forms — 8.65 per cent of the 2,78,50,855 forms distributed — were marked as “uncollected”. Voters who did not return the forms will not be included in the draft SIR rolls.

The letter stated that the more than 24 lakh missing voters fall into categories including absent or untraceable, permanently shifted, deceased and duplicate entries. Those classified as permanently shifted represent the largest group, numbering 8,16,221, or 2.93 per cent of the total.