The Election Commission on Monday announced that a special intensive revision of voter rolls will be carried out in 12 states and Union Territories.

The exercise will cover Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar said at a press conference.

Polls are scheduled for Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry next year.

Kumar said a separate order will be issued later for Assam, as the Citizenship Act has separate provisions for the state.

The chief election commissioner also said that Aadhaar cards can be used only for identification. He added that enumeration forms will be pre-filled with already available details, including details of the previous exercise.

The draft electoral rolls will be published on December 9, while the final electoral rolls on February 7, 2026.

Kumar said that in states where the revision will be carried out, electoral rolls will be frozen at midnight on Monday. “Political parties have raised the issue of the quality of electoral rolls on several occasions,” he said, adding that voters will now be given unique enumeration forms containing all their details.

All chief electoral officers and district electoral officers have been directed to meet political parties by Wednesday to brief them on the process. The poll panel also clarified that except for the enumeration form, no other documents will be collected during the enumeration phase.

Training for polling officials for the second phase of the exercise will also begin on Tuesday.

On Thursday, the poll panel had taken stock of the preparedness of all states and Union Territories for the pan-India revision of the electoral rolls at a two-day conference of chief electoral officers in New Delhi.

In a statement, the Election Commission said that it had directed the chief electoral officers to finalise their preparations for the exercise in their respective states and Union Territories.

It also assessed the progress made on the directions previously issued to them to map the current electors with the electors as per the last special intensive revision in the states and Union Territories.

Concerns have been raised that the revision of the electoral rolls could disenfranchise several voters. The Election Commission has defended the voter roll revision as a clean-up exercise to remove names of the deceased, duplicate entries and undocumented migrants.

The exercise was conducted in Bihar in recent months ahead of the Assembly elections in the state. At least 47 lakh voters in Bihar were excluded from the final electoral roll published by the Election Commission on September 30 after the revision of the list.

Several petitioners had moved the Supreme Court against the exercise. On September 8, the court had directed the Election Commission to accept Aadhaar as a valid identity proof for the exercise in Bihar.

The Aadhaar card was not among the 11 documents that the poll panel had said could be submitted as proof of citizenship. Several petitioners had objected to the exclusion of Aadhaar, the most widely held ID, from the list of permissible documents, calling it “absurd”.

In September, the Kerala Assembly unanimously passed a resolution against the poll panel’s decision to conduct the revision of the state’s electoral rolls in the state, saying that the “hasty” move could harm the rights of citizens.

On Friday, the Election Commission had also told the Madras High Court that the special intensive revision of the voter roll in Tamil Nadu would begin “in a week or so”.

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