Living for 50 years at the same address. Voting in every election since the 1970s. Today, the Election Commission says he cannot be found. His name is Faiyaz Ahmed. He is 74, a retired professor of mechanical engineering at Jamia Millia Islamia, and he has lived in the same home for more than five decades. Under SIR, he is untraceable. His wife Anjum Ara, 62, lives in the same house. Under SIR, she has permanently shifted. They never moved. Election Commission moved them out of the voter list. This is Okhla, Delhi - Citizens groups went door to door in just two polling booths, covering 258 households over seven days. They found at least 100 voters wrongly marked absent, shifted, dead or duplicate. That was two booths. Across Okhla, nearly 1.6 lakh names appeared on the Commission's list of absent, shifted, dead & duplicate voters & more than 67,000 voters were put on the notice list. Okhla has seen the second highest rate of deletions. If two booths hide 100 wrongful cases, the question isn't whether there's a problem. It's how big the problem is. Look at who the Commission erased. 🔹Faiyaz Ahmed's son says he handed in completed enumeration forms for both his parents to the BLO. His own name made it to the draft roll. His parents' names did not. 🔹Naeemuddin, a former government adviser, has lived at the same address for 30 years. He went to his BLO himself. BLO took his photograph and got his signature on a form. He was still marked permanently shifted. He stood in front of the Commission's own officer and was recorded as gone. 🔹Ravi, 37, is alive. Under the voter ID card he was issued in 2023, he is listed as dead. His record now sits under a different EPIC number that no one ever told him about. 🔹Md. Farid Anwar's family was told by the BLO that his name had been deleted before the revision began. Yet his name appears on the SIR deletion list, with his form marked uncollectable. The two official explanations cannot both be true. And what is the remedy for these citizens? Form 6, the form for new voters. A man who has voted for half a century is told to apply as if he were voting for the first time. His record is wiped and his voting history is gone, and what was his right becomes an application. More than 110 people left that hearing holding Form 6. None of them should have needed it. Commission says it is holding weekend camps so that no eligible voter is left out. Around 20 voters who spoke to The Hindu had never heard of these camps. Some didn't even know who their BLO was. The clock is running. Form 6 applications close on October 30. The final roll will be published on December 4 Any voter who doesn't find out in time loses their vote without ever knowing it happened. In Karnataka, voters are being declared dead on forms they never filed. In Delhi, voters who stood before officials are being marked absent. Different states, same pattern: the Commission makes the mistake, and the citizen pays the price. Questions must be answered - 🔹Who verified Okhla's nearly 1.6 lakh deletion-list entries, and did anyone actually knock on those doors? 🔹How was a voter who personally appeared before the BLO, was photographed and signed a form, recorded as "permanently shifted"? 🔹Why are voters registered for decades being forced to re-enrol as new voters instead of having their original records restored? 🔹Why did not a single official attend a public hearing where more than 150 affected voters came forward? 🔹Will the October 30 deadline be extended, and will every person on the deletion list be personally informed? In 7 days, citizens & volunteers did what the Election Commission failed to do in months. They found the voters it lost. The vote belongs to the citizen, not the Commission. A name deleted wrongly is a citizen silenced. thehindu.com/news/cities/De…