Karnataka State Election Commission Faces Challenges in Conducting Bengaluru Civic Body Elections

BENGALURU: Conducting civic body elections in Bengaluru continues to be a challenge for the State Election Commission of Karnataka (SEC-K), even though the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise has been completed. A senior SEC official said, “The Election Commission of India (ECI) is yet to give us the data, which then needs to be bifurcated ward wise. The delay in procuring data will impact the lined-up events. The timely completion of the city corporation elections, as per Supreme Court orders, before December-end 2026 could then become difficult.” Other officials said they are preparing a detailed chronology of events that have happened and events scheduled for the coming days that will be submitted before the high court and Supreme Court, hearing cases related to corporation elections. “We will place these facts before the courts, seeking more time if we don’t get data from ECI within a couple of days. After that conducting corporation elections would be a challenge,” the official added. In the final electoral roll, published on October 27 after the SIR exercise, names of 99,32,303 electors have been cleaned. Till June 16, the state had 5,54,32,314 electors, while the revised list now has 4,55,00,011 voters. In all, 44,80,212 names have been cleaned from the rolls. The data shows that Bengaluru has a population of 1,07,08,716, while 59,09,775 are voters. Bengaluru Urban district houses 24,01,939 electors, BBMP North -- 13,25,284, BBMP Central -- 10,67,374 and BBMP South -- 11,13,554. The SEC official explained, “The final rolls were made public, but we are yet to get complete information. We have written to ECI seeking it. Once we get it, depending on the type of data disseminated -- whether raw or assembly constituency-wise -- it needs to be processed through our software for ward-wise division.