Millions of Indians live and work in one place and are registered to vote in another. There is no general absentee ballot for them, so the honest answer is that you have three options, and two of them require a decision well before polling day.
Option one: move your registration
If the place you live in is now your ordinary residence, move your entry there. This is Form 8, shifting of residence, and it goes to the Electoral Registration Officer of the constituency you have moved to. See changing your address on the electoral roll.
Ordinary residence means where you actually live, not where you own property or where your family is from. A student in a hostel and a worker in a rented room both qualify where they live.
The cost is that you lose your vote in your home constituency. For many people that is the harder part of the decision, not the paperwork.
Option two: keep your registration and travel
You remain on the roll at home and go back to vote. This is what most people do, and it is why turnout in some constituencies visibly rises around polling day.
If you are employed by a business or other establishment, Section 135B of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 normally gives you a paid holiday on your home constituency’s polling day at Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, even if you work somewhere else.
Option three: check whether you qualify as an absentee voter
At Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, postal voting is available only to the classes listed in Rule 18 of the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961: service voters, special voters such as Governors and Cabinet Ministers, voters on election duty, electors in preventive detention, and absentee voters in categories the Election Commission notifies for each election. Those categories have included electors aged 85 and above, electors with a benchmark disability who are marked as such on the roll, and essential services staff on duty on polling day, a group that has included media persons the Commission authorised to cover the poll. Full detail is in postal ballots and voting away from home.
Living in another city is not one of the categories. If someone tells you a migrant worker can simply request a postal ballot, they are wrong.
What you must not do
Do not register in both places. Filing Form 6 where you now live, while keeping your old entry, creates a duplicate. The declaration on Form 6 is a legal statement and a false one is punishable under Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
If you already have two entries, fix it rather than leaving it. See duplicate entries and how to resolve them.
Decide early
Both of the first two options depend on the roll. Corrections and deletions stop once an election is announced, and under Section 23(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 no change can be made after the last date for nominations until the election is over. Whichever you choose, act during the claims and objections window rather than in the campaign.
Correction, 24 September 2026: This article previously said polling day is a paid holiday for most employees. Section 135B gives the holiday to people employed by businesses and other establishments, on the polling day of the constituency where they are registered, at Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. It also gave an incomplete list of who can vote by post and treated accredited media as a separate category; it now lists the classes in Rule 18 of the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, with media persons covered as essential services staff. And it said the roll freezes once an election is announced: only corrections and deletions stop then, and no change can be made from the last date for nominations until the election is over.
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Published 12 August 2026 · Last updated 24 September 2026
