Unprecedented rupture inside Election Commission: ECs call steps on new voters ‘unauthorised, illegal’

Why in the News

Two of the three Election Commissioners have objected on record at least 14 times over the last 10 months to decisions taken and orders issued in the name of the Election Commission of India (ECI) without their knowledge. Four of those objections were recorded on a single day, and five of the 14 notes were copied to the Chief Election Commissioner. They call the changes made to the form a new voter fills “unauthorised” and “illegal”. They also warn that the electoral roll database is being centralised in Delhi, restricting the statutory officers on the ground. The objections run alongside the national rollout of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which has struck more than 13 crore names off the draft rolls in 30 States and Union Territories. The law requires this three-member constitutional body to transact its business unanimously as far as possible, and the two members who form its majority say they were kept in the dark.

What is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls?

1. About: The SIR is a special revision of the electoral roll that the Commission may order under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
2. A one-time exception: The provision was invoked as a one time measure and exception, not as the ordinary revision route.
3. Non-statutory forms: The forms prescribed for the SIR are specific to that exercise and are non-statutory, meaning they are not part of the law.
4. Rollout: The revision began in Bihar in June 2025. It was then extended state by state, and was under way in 12 States and Union Territories by January 2026.

How is the Election Commission legally required to transact its business?

1. Constitutional composition: The Commission is a constitutional body under Article 324. It is made up of the Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners who are equal in rank.
2. No power to decide alone: The Chief Election Commissioner is first among equals. He does not have the power to decide by himself.
3. Unanimity as the default: Section 18 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023 requires all business of the Commission to be transacted unanimously as far as possible. Where the members differ on any matter, that matter is decided by the opinion of the majority.
4. Procedure only by unanimity: The same section lets the Commission settle its own procedure and the division of its work only by unanimous decision.
5. Communications without approval: In April one Commissioner told senior officers that many communications go out in the ECI’s name without the Commission’s approval. Eight days later the other recorded that several communications are disseminated without the requisite approval of the Commission.
6. Appointment route: All three members were appointed under the 2023 Act by a selection panel of the Prime Minister, the Union Home Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The Opposition member on the panel recorded a dissent over the appointment process on both occasions.

Why do two Commissioners call the change to the new voter form unauthorised and illegal?

1. The change: From July the form every adult citizen fills to become a voter began asking whether the applicant, or a parent or grandparent, exists in the electoral roll of the last SIR. Applicants could not proceed without answering.
2. Three options and no fourth: The applicant had to pick between their own name in the roll of the last SIR held in the early 2000s, a parent’s or grandparent’s name in that roll, or neither. The section was not marked mandatory, yet the form could not be submitted without an answer.
3. A statutory form has a statutory route: Form 6 for new registration and Form 8 for corrections are prescribed statutorily. Neither can be altered without amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.
4. The warning on file: One Commissioner recorded in May that a sentence in an SIR order or guideline cannot change a form fixed by law. His colleague concurred on file three days later.
5. The advised course: The recorded advice was to send the proposal to the Government for changes to the rules. A draft of the changes to both forms was to be placed before the Commission.
6. The precedent for the correct route: Parliament amended the Representation of the People Act, 1950 in 2021 to let the Commission collect Aadhaar numbers from voters. The Law Ministry’s Legislative Department, not the Commission, notified the consequent changes to the Rules and to Form 6 in June 2022.
7. The objection on record: In August one Commissioner recorded that the change was “unauthorised and illegal” and “must be removed immediately so that young and would-be first time voters, who are otherwise eligible, can register themselves as voters as per law, without any harassment”.
8. The change survived the objection: The question was still on the portal more than a month after that note.
9. Why it matters for an 18 year old: The right to vote belongs to the individual, who qualifies by age, citizenship and residence. An applicant whose parents and grandparents did not figure in the last SIR roll could not truthfully choose either of the first two options, and the form did not explain the consequence of choosing the third.

What does centralisation of the voter database do to the statutory officer on the ground?

1. The decentralised design: The Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 assign the electoral roll to an Electoral Registration Officer (ERO), one for each Assembly seat, usually the sub-divisional magistrate. The ERO prepares the list, hears claims and objections, and decides which names stay.
2. The Commission’s standing defence: For decades the ECI has answered allegations of mass manipulation of rolls by pointing to that design. No single person is supposed to control the voters’ list.
3. The platform: ECINet, launched in January, brought more than 40 of the Commission’s apps and portals under one roof as the technology backbone for almost a billion voters. It subsumed ERONet, the earlier roll management system.
4. Warnings before the launch: In November 2025 a Deputy Election Commissioner wrote, on a Commissioner’s directions, that the statutory functions of the ERO, the District Election Officer and the Chief Electoral Officer were “to be strictly exercised by them and no one else”.
5. Warning on the new module: In January 2026 the same officer asked that the system not restrict the ERO’s discretion to act, as EROs were put on a new module for issuing notices and holding hearings. ECINet was launched twenty days later.
6. Access withdrawn in practice: In August one Commissioner recorded that state level officials said they did not have “proper and complete access” to ERONet and so could not perform their statutory duties. Their powers had been “curtailed by centralised control of ERONet at DG(IT) level”, he wrote.
7. Question of legal authority: The Commission’s Director General (Information Technology) has no legal authority to restrict the access and freedom to operate that the law gives the statutory authorities, that note recorded.
8. Audit proposed: In May one Commissioner flagged the “gradual centralisation of the electoral roll database”. He proposed an audit, with an outside expert from the Indian Institutes of Technology, to certify that only the concerned statutory authorities hold credentials to change the voter database.
9. Two committees proposed: One committee was to review the systems periodically and certify who holds those credentials. A second was to check whether ECINet complies with the law and to bring policy changes before the Commission.
10. Outcome of the proposal: The other Commissioner endorsed it in July. In August he recorded that any action taken on the two notes was not known to him.
11. What is at stake: A voter can be eligible, prove it, be found eligible by the officer the law appoints, and still not appear on the roll. A team in Delhi that controls what the software permits can stall, override or cancel what ground level officials decide.

How was the oversight layer over the IT division removed?

1. The chain that existed: A Deputy Election Commissioner in New Delhi oversaw the IT division’s work and routed its files to the three-member Commission. The two Commissioners had used that chain to seek briefings and to propose the audit.
2. The reallocation: In late July a Senior Deputy Election Commissioner was given additional charge of administration during the regular officer’s leave. Within hours he changed the work allocation without consulting the Commission, taking the Deputy Election Commissioner out of oversight of the IT division.
3. Escalation outside the Commission: The two Commissioners each wrote separately to the Cabinet Secretary the next day. They called the order a clear violation of the law governing the Commission and sought appropriate action against the officer.
4. The order set aside: A day later the two jointly set the order aside as “without any reason and justification”. They directed the previous work allocation to continue until the Commission reached a consensus.
5. First full meeting in four months: The Chief Election Commissioner and the two Commissioners then met on 9 September. It was their first full meeting in four months.

What did the West Bengal appeals and the Goa rejections expose?

1. Scale of contestation in West Bengal: The SIR was most deeply contested in West Bengal. Of the 294 seats that went to polls, deletions exceeded the victory margin in 49, and those were shared almost evenly, with 26 won by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and 21 by the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
2. The Court’s intervention: The manner in which names were struck off prompted the Supreme Court in February 2026 to take the last leg of the SIR out of the Commission’s hands. Judicial officers were directed to decide the cases of 60 lakh voters flagged for “logical discrepancies”.
3. Deletions and appeals: The Commission subsequently deleted 27 lakh of those electors. Tribunals of retired High Court judges were ordered to hear appeals, and 38 lakh appeals are now pending before them.
4. Appeals against restored voters: Of those pending appeals, 22.21 lakh were filed by deleted voters seeking restoration. The other 16.10 lakh were filed against voters whom the judicial officers had included, and the Commission did not say who filed them.
5. The objection recorded: One Commissioner asked in August who was authorised to file appeals on the ECI’s behalf, and who actually filed them. Neither Commissioner nor the state’s Chief Electoral Officer had been informed of the basis or the process, he recorded.
6. Goa, a decision the software could not hold: A “logical discrepancy” is a mismatch the software throws up when it tries to link a voter to a parent or relative on an older roll, such as a name that does not match or an age gap that does not add up. Goa’s EROs heard such cases on the documents produced and found 97 voters eligible for the final roll.
7. Eight unanswered letters: Goa’s Chief Electoral Officer’s office wrote eight times in February to the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner in charge of the state, copying the Director General (Information Technology) each time. It asked for the rollback option that would let EROs reverse the earlier deletions, as the Supreme Court had directed in January.
8. The outcome: The provision was not enabled before the deadline for publishing the final roll. The 97 were left off the final voters’ roll in Goa.

How does this rupture differ from earlier dissent inside the Commission?

1. The 2009 episode: In January 2009 the Chief Election Commissioner wrote to the President recommending that Election Commissioner Navin Chawla be removed for alleged partisan conduct. The Government rejected the recommendation in March 2009, and Chawla succeeded him as Chief Election Commissioner that April.
2. The 2019 episode: In May 2019 Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner that he would stop attending meetings on Model Code of Conduct complaints until his minority decisions were recorded in the final orders. He had disagreed with the majority’s clean chits to the Prime Minister and to the then president of the BJP.
3. How that ended: The full Commission decided, 2-1, that dissents would be recorded in the file but not in the orders. Lavasa left the Commission the following year, before his turn as Chief Election Commissioner.
4. Dissent on an outcome, not on process: In both episodes an individual member dissented on a specific decision on which he had been overruled.
5. This time the majority is in the dark: The two Commissioners who form the majority are recording that decisions were taken, orders issued and cases filed without their knowledge. That is a statement about how the Commission functions, not a disagreement over a result.
6. No response: The Commission and both Commissioners did not respond to questionnaires, emails and follow up calls.

Conclusion

A constitutional body’s strongest answer to charges of roll manipulation has been that no single office controls the list. That answer now turns on who holds the credentials to the software. The two members who form the majority have put on record that they cannot verify the claim themselves, and the Commission has not answered the questions they raised. The markers to watch are whether the disputed declaration is taken off the new voter form, whether the proposed audit of database credentials is placed before the full Commission, and whether the Commission discloses who filed appeals in its name against voters that a court’s officers had restored.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2018, GS2, 10 marks] In the light of recent controversy regarding the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), what are the challenges before the Election Commission of India to ensure the trustworthiness of elections in India?”