Why in the News
The 2025-26 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is the first revision of this scale run through a centralised digital platform, and the technology itself has become a source of exclusion. Debate has centred on the Election Commission of India (ECI), its document list and the burden on voters. As a digital project, the SIR skipped the testing behind India’s successful public platforms.
Why is the SIR’s technology record an irony?
- What it is: India presents itself as a leader in digital public infrastructure, shared digital systems that serve the whole population. Eg. Railway ticketing, income tax e-filing, Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and DigiLocker.
- Built over years: Those systems came from years of piloting, iteration and published specifications, disciplines the SIR omitted.
- Central platform: ERONet, the ECI’s roll management platform, generated notices centrally. An unpublished rule coded into it decides who must appear for a hearing.
- The takeaway: In the most basic democratic process, untested software excluded citizens whom India’s own technology record could have protected.
What were the five technology failures?
- Rigid discrepancy flags: ERONet issued “logical discrepancy” notices using filters such as the parent child age gap and children per parent. Ages on Indian rolls are often approximate, so such rules misfire.
- Uneven impact: Family size checks on Delhi’s draft roll flagged Muslim electors at a markedly higher rate, The Hindu found.
- Unvalidated name matching: West Bengal’s 2002 Bengali rolls were rendered into English, reportedly by machine, garbling many names. Over 1.3 crore entries were flagged, and name variations made up more than half of the discrepancy cases.
- Features changed mid operation: De-duplication software, which flags people holding two voter IDs, was switched back on in some States. The ECI had told the Supreme Court in late 2025 it was unreliable.
- Relative mapping: A new algorithm checking how voters are “mapped” to relatives on the old roll forced Booth Level Officers (BLOs) to redo completed work.
- Rules by video: New ERONet options in October let Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) close notices without hearings. Videos and WhatsApp groups, not written orders, explained them.
- Forms drifted from law: The online Form 6, the application for a new voter, carried a parent and grandparent declaration that applicants could not skip. The Supreme Court said it never approved that change.
Why does it matter that code decided the rules?
- “Code is law”: Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig warned over two decades ago that “code is law”. In the SIR, rules written into software decided what statute did not.
- Opaque rules for officers: BLOs and EROs, the roll’s statutory custodians, implement decisions they cannot see. Citizens have no written rule to cite on appeal.
- Legality unsettled: The Supreme Court has not ruled on the logical discrepancy category’s legality, allowing it in West Bengal only as an interim arrangement.
- Time set by the poll calendar: Enumeration in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal ran about six weeks before April polls. West Bengal’s final roll still marked over half a crore names “under adjudication”.
Challenges
- No pilots: Name matching across scripts is a known difficulty, yet it reached lakhs of households unpiloted.
- No change freeze: The live system kept changing, so untested features reached officers.
- Centralised control: The platform took from EROs the discretion to decide which flagged cases need a hearing.
Way Forward
- Test discrepancy filters: The ECI should test discrepancy filters on real roll data before issuing notices.
- Written procedures first: Issue written Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) before training officers.
- Align forms with statute: Keep digital forms identical to the statutory forms.
Conclusion
The SIR shows that software can quietly replace the law in deciding who stays on the electoral roll. Whether these failures were foreseen and ignored, or never foreseen, remains open, and neither answer reassures voters.
What is a Special Intensive Revision?
- About: A time bound, house to house re-enumeration of the roll. Every voter fills a fresh form, which BLOs verify at the door.
- Legal basis: Article 324 gives the ECI control over electoral rolls. Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 lets it order a special revision at any time, for reasons recorded.
- Procedure: The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 fix the draft roll, claims and objections, and notice and hearing before deletion. The ERO decides every inclusion and deletion.
- Rarely used: Intensive revisions were carried out 13 times between 1952 and 2004, the last in 2002 to 2004.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2026, GS2, 10 marks] Is the right to vote a fundamental right? Discuss the position of the Election Commission of India while undertaking the revision of electoral rolls. Can it also examine the question of citizenship of voters?”
