More than 18.78 lakh appeals filed by voters deleted during the adjudication phase of West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) 2026 had no recorded tribunal decision as of September 28, according to a dataset compiled by the Civic Research Group (CRG), a “group of researchers, analysts and field contributors in West Bengal.”
The CRG’s Tribunal Appeal and Disposal Evidence Report covered all 294 Assembly constituencies across 23 districts.
Only 37,272 of the 19,15,941 applications in the dataset had recorded decisions, covering both approved and rejected, meaning 98.05 per cent remained pending.
An approval means the tribunal set aside the judicial officer’s decision and reinstated the elector’s status, while a rejection upheld the deletion.
CRG, however, cautions that these cases represent only a small share of the applications. The approval rate therefore cannot be used to predict the outcome of pending appeals.
The research began with 27,05,162 deleted-elector records from the adjudication phase. CRG processed 25,75,663 EPIC numbers, or 95.21 per cent of the records. Of these, 23,42,259 returned valid responses on the ECI portal, with names matching the deletion lists. This group accounted for 86.58 per cent of all deleted-elector records.
All observed appeal figures in the report are drawn from this group.
Most applications online
Among electors with validated EPIC numbers, 81.80 per cent had an appeal recorded. Most, or 17,67,095, were filed online, while 1,48,846, or 7.77 per cent, were recorded as offline applications.
Another 4,26,318 validated records were classified as “not applied”. CRG cautions that this category may include electors who submitted offline appeals that were not entered on the portal. It therefore cannot be treated as a definitive count of people who did not appeal.
Huge difference in distribution of decision
The distribution of decisions also varied sharply across districts, said the CRG. Hooghly accounted for 20,703 decisions, or 55.55 per cent of the statewide total, while Murshidabad, which had the highest number of applications, recorded only 275 decisions. Thirty-one constituencies had no recorded tribunal decision, while the remaining 263 had at least one.
Across the state, 31 constituencies had no recorded tribunal decision. The other had at least one, said the report.
The ECI does not publish a status report for appeal cases, so researchers have to check the status through each EPIC.
The group used ECI adjudication deletion lists and supplementary electoral rolls, along with digitised records from the Sabar Institute’s SIR Deleted Data Repository. It had volunteers manually check unresolved entries against published deletion rolls.
However, it pointed out that the coverage was inconclusive, as 1,29,499 deletion records were not processed, while 2,33,404 processed EPIC numbers could not be validated. Their appeal status could not be established.
It said this could be attributed to the electoral records being published as PDFs as well as the requirement of an OTP, which made verification of each EPIC harder.
Also, the observations are only on appeals against exclusion filed by voters who were removed and not appeals against inclusion that the poll body or third parties filed.
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