West Bengal was on course to record its highest turnout ever in an Assembly election, with the first phase of polling on Thursday recording a provisional turnout of 91.78% — the first polls since the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) cut the electoral rolls by 11%, leaving another 27.10 lakh deleted electors in limbo with their appeals pending before tribunals.
In Tamil Nadu, too, the turnout crossed the previous record, with EC data showing 84.69% polling. The state saw 72.73% polling in the last Assembly elections.
Polling in 152 out of the 294 Assembly seats in West Bengal was conducted on Thursday, with a total 1,478 candidates in the fray across 44,376 polling stations. The remaining seats go to polls on April 29.
Since 1951, the highest turnout so far was 84.33% in 2011, when Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had stormed to power, ending the 34-year-rule of the CPI(M). In the 2021 Assembly elections, the state recorded a turnout of 81.56%.
Samserganj, in Murshidabad district, which had the highest deletions in the SIR adjudication phase in phase one, had recorded 95.34% turnout until 5 pm, according to the ECINET app. The other seats among the top five in terms of deletions, Lalgola (Murshidabad), Bhagawangola (Murshidabad), Raghunathpur (Purulia) and Farakka (Murshidabad), too, had high turnouts, at 95.07%, 95.31%, 88.69% and 94.61% until 5 pm respectively.
Polling was conducted amid heavy deployment of Central Armed Paramilitary Force (CAPF) personnel by the EC, with around 2.4 lakh personnel, 152 general observers, 58 police observers and state police personnel deployed in West Bengal.
EC’s Special Election Observer in Bengal, Subrata Gupta, said apart from some sporadic incidents, polling was violence-free. “We are taking action on every complaint. We are taking action on all the complaints that have come in… Regarding statutory violations, complaints related to EVMs, we have instructed the presiding officers and returning officers to take action. In the case of law and order issues, we have immediately contacted the CAPF’s QRT. I have requested an investigation report, and based on that, we will take action,” said Gupta.
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In West Bengal, the elections were held after a contentious SIR exercise started in October last year. In June 2025, the EC had announced the SIR of electoral rolls, starting with Bihar as Assembly elections were due in the state. As opposed to the annual and pre-election Special Summary Revision (SSR) of electoral rolls that has been the practice for the past 20 years, the EC decided to conduct an intensive revision, where electoral rolls are prepared afresh.
In a departure from previous intensive revisions, the last round of which was held in the early 2000s across states, the SIR 2025-2026 adopted a document-based approach, where all registered electors were required to submit forms, and some categories of electors needed to provide documents from a list of 13 identified by the EC in order to establish their eligibility, including citizenship. In the case of West Bengal, the EC deployed micro-observers to review the decisions taken by the statutory authority, the Electoral Registration Officers, leading to an unprecedented Supreme Court-ordered adjudication and appeal process in which 27.10 lakh electors were deleted.
As polls closed on Thursday evening, the TMC said in a statement: “Despite the Election Commission deleting 91 lakh names through SIR, Bengal has delivered a record voter turnout… It is over for the BJP”. It said the reason for the high voter turnout was “because the people of Bengal know this could be their last real chance to secure their future”.
“They see the NRC and delimitation threat staring them in the face, and they have voted with full force to smash every future conspiracy of BJP,” the party said.
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In a post on X, Home Minister Amit Shah, who was in Kolkata on Thursday, said: “The sun of the TMC’s corruption and hooliganism has set.”
