Odisha’s urban local body elections, planned for March-April, will be conducted using electronic voting machines (EVMs), while the state will retain paper ballots for panchayat polls, State Election Commissioner Madhusudan Padhi said on Thursday. The State Election Commission will also conduct a door-to-door voter survey from October 26 to November 7 to identify eligible voters missing from the electoral rolls.
The SEC will use the voter list published on September 21 after the Special Intensive Revision as the basis for preparing ward-wise electoral rolls for the local elections. The draft electoral roll will be published on January 1, 2027, followed by a 20-day period for claims and objections. The final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on February 10, 2027.
Officials said paper ballots would continue to be used for panchayat elections because conducting voting for four rural posts would require a large number of EVMs. Voters in those elections cast ballots for ward member, sarpanch, panchayat samiti member and zilla parishad member across more than 91,000 polling booths.
The SEC estimates that around 3.6 lakh EVMs would be needed for the panchayat elections. By comparison, simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly elections require about 75,000 EVMs for nearly 37,000 polling stations, while urban local body elections would require approximately 12,000 machines.
The voter survey will seek to ensure that members of the same family are assigned to a single polling station and that electors from the same locality are grouped under the same booth wherever possible. Members of a household will be listed sequentially in the electoral roll and linked to a unique house number.
The SEC will deploy booth-level officers, anganwadi workers, ASHA workers, jalasathis and swachhasathis for door-to-door verification. The exercise will be supervised by panchayat executive officers, booth-level officer supervisors, assistant electoral registration officers and electoral registration officers.
Political parties have been asked to nominate booth-level agents to support the process and make it more participatory and transparent. The arrangement places local administrative and frontline workers at the centre of the voter-verification exercise, particularly in identifying eligible residents who may have been left out of the revised list.
Voters will be able to seek inclusion or correction of names through Claim Form-16 in rural areas, Form-III in urban local bodies and Form-VII in municipal corporations. Objections to deletion of names can be filed through Form 17 for rural areas, Form 4 for urban local bodies and Form 8 for municipal corporations.
The immediate administrative milestones are the door-to-door survey beginning October 26, publication of the draft electoral roll on January 1 and publication of the final roll on February 10. The urban local body elections are planned for March-April, according to the State Election Commission.
