Bhubaneswar: Odisha will continue to conduct panchayat elections using paper ballots, while urban local body polls, planned in March-April, will be held with electronic voting machines (EVMs), state election commissioner Madhusudan Padhi said on Thursday.The State Election Commission (SEC) will use the voter list published on Sept 21 following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) as the basis for preparing ward-wise electoral rolls. A door-to-door survey will be conducted from Oct 26 to Nov 7 to identify and enrol eligible voters left out of the list.Padhi said the SEC has decided to retain paper ballots for rural polls because a massive number of EVMs would have been required. Officials said around 3.6 lakh EVMs would be needed for panchayat elections, as voters cast ballots for four posts — ward member, sarpanch, panchayat samiti member and zilla parishad member — across more than 91,000 booths.By comparison, simultaneous Lok Sabha and assembly elections require around 75,000 EVMs for nearly 37,000 polling stations, while urban local body elections need about 12,000 machines.According to the SEC’s schedule, the draft electoral roll will be published on Jan 1, 2027, after completion of the survey. Electors will have 20 days to file claims and objections, after which the final electoral roll will be published on Feb 10.Officials said the survey aims to ensure that members of the same family are assigned to a single polling station and, wherever possible, electors from the same locality are grouped under the same booth. Voters in a household will be listed sequentially in the electoral roll and linked to a unique house number.Political parties have been asked to nominate booth-level agents to facilitate a more participatory and transparent exercise.For inclusion or correction of names, applications can be submitted through Claim Form-16 in rural areas, Form-III in urban bodies and Form-VII in municipal corporations. Objections for deletion of names can be filed through Form 17, Form 4 and Form 8.The SEC will deploy booth-level officers (BLOs), anganwadi workers, ASHAs, jalasathis and swachhasathis to conduct the survey for door-to-door verification. The process will be supervised by panchayat executive officers, BLO supervisors, assistant electoral registration officers and electoral registration officers.