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Subject: RPAxElectoral Reforms

  • How should RUPPs be regulated?

    Why in the News

    Six Registered Unrecognised Political Parties (RUPP) based in Gujarat received donations of about Rs 1,700 crore in the 2023 to 2024 financial year. A RUPP is a party registered with the Election Commission of India (EC) that has not met the vote and seat tests for recognition as a State or a national party. That single figure exceeds the Rs 1,480 crore received in the same period by five nationally recognised parties other than the Bharatiya Janata Party. The six remain on the list of active parties because they fielded candidates in the last general election. Registration brings tax exemption and a common symbol, and the law gives the Election Commission almost no power to remove a party that does nothing else.

    What is a Registered Unrecognised Political Party?

    1. The registering provision: Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (RP Act) sets out the requirements for registering a political party with the Election Commission.
    2. How registration happens: The Commission registers a party as a RUPP after satisfactory scrutiny of the documents submitted to it.
    3. Tax exemption on donations: Donations received are exempt under Section 12 of the Income Tax Act, 2025.
    4. Electoral privileges: A RUPP gets a common symbol for contesting general elections to the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies, and is allowed 20 star campaigners during a campaign.

    What must a RUPP disclose, and what follows if it does not?

    1. Donor records above a threshold: Details of individual donors giving more than twenty thousand rupees in a financial year must be maintained and submitted to the Election Commission every year.
    2. The penalty for non disclosure: Under Section 29C of the RP Act, failure to furnish those details results in loss of income tax exemption.
    3. A cap on cash: Donations above two thousand rupees may be accepted only by cheque or bank transfer under the Income Tax Act, 2025.

    Why do parties that never seriously contest stay on the register?

    1. The gap between registration and contest: India had more than 2,800 RUPPs as of July, and only around 750 contested the 2024 general elections.
    2. The label that followed: The remainder are described as “letter pad parties”, since registration is all they maintain.
    3. No power to deregister: The RP Act confers no explicit power on the Election Commission to remove a party from the register for failing to contest elections, hold internal elections or lodge required returns.
    4. The position in law: In Indian National Congress v. Institute of Social Welfare and Others (2002) the Supreme Court held that the Commission has no power to deregister a political party under the RP Act.
    5. The narrow exceptions: Removal is available only where registration was obtained by fraud, where the party ceases to have allegiance to the Constitution, or where it is declared unlawful by the government.
    6. Delisting is not removal from the register: The Commission periodically publishes a list of delisted RUPPs, and its notification of October 2025 carried over 800 such parties.
    7. A minimal contest keeps a party active: The six Gujarat based parties stayed on the active list by fielding a total of 15 candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Eg. They are the Aam Janmat Party, Bharatiya National Janata Dal, Garib Kalyan Party, New India United Party, Satyawadi Rakshak Party and Swatantrata Abhivyakti Party.

    What does the compliance record show?

    1. Most annual reports never reach the public: A July 2025 report of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), analysing annual reports for 2022 to 2023, found reports of only 26% of RUPPs available in the public domain.
    2. What weak compliance enables: Poor compliance with statutory requirements together with low transparency lets these parties serve as an opaque channel for tax evasion and money laundering.
    3. The scale problem: A register of thousands of entities, most of which never contest, cannot be policed through annual return scrutiny alone.

    What reforms have been proposed?

    1. The Law Commission’s recommendation: The 255th report of the Law Commission recommended amendments allowing removal from the register of a party that fails to contest elections for ten consecutive years.
    2. The Election Commission’s own proposal: Its memorandum on electoral reforms of 2016 sought an amendment to the RP Act empowering it to deregister a party.
    3. Enforcement rather than registration alone: Transaction level monitoring by the Income Tax Department and other enforcement agencies is feasible with digital records and would act as a deterrent against misuse of exemptions.
    4. Linking exemption to electoral success: The Election Commission has suggested that tax exemption be confined to parties that win seats in the Lok Sabha or a Legislative Assembly.
    5. Why that proposal is contested: Confining exemption to winners is open to the objection that it is undemocratic and extreme, since parties contest consistently without electoral success.
    6. A vote share threshold instead: A vote percentage threshold fixed by law could govern eligibility for tax exemption, on the model of the 1% vote threshold already used for allotting common symbols to RUPPs.

    Challenges to regulating Registered Unrecognised Political Parties

    1. Entry is easy and exit is absent: The statute sets a documentary threshold for entry and provides almost no route out, so the register only grows. Eg. The number of registered parties has risen steadily across successive general elections.
      The Fix: Provide for statutory lapse of registration where a party files no return and contests no election within a fixed period.
    2. Token candidature defeats a contest based test: A party that fields a handful of candidates satisfies any rule keyed to mere participation while doing nothing else. Eg. A large share of candidates in a general election forfeit their security deposit for polling below one sixth of valid votes.
      The Fix: Key the test to a minimum vote share rather than to the act of contesting.
    3. Tax exemption is the actual prize: Exemption on donations makes registration valuable to entities with no electoral purpose at all. Eg. Tax investigations into registered unrecognised parties have found arrangements in which most of a donation was returned to the donor in cash against a commission.
      The Fix: Make exemption conditional on an audited annual return filed on time, rather than automatic on registration.
    4. Disclosure thresholds leave most money invisible: Only contributions above the reporting threshold must be itemised, so funds can be split into smaller amounts. Eg. Parties routinely report large sums under the head of voluntary contributions from unnamed donors.
      The Fix: Require itemised reporting of every contribution above the cash limit, aligning the disclosure threshold with the banking channel threshold.
    5. Enforcement is split across agencies with different mandates: The Election Commission holds the register and the Income Tax Department holds the financial trail, and neither can act on the other’s finding. Eg. Delisting by the Commission does not by itself withdraw an exemption already claimed.
      The Fix: Provide for automatic reference from the Commission to the tax authority on default, with a statutory timeline for action.

    Conclusion

    Regulation here has been treated as a records problem when it is a design problem. The register was built to be easy to enter, because a democracy should not gate the formation of parties, and nothing was built to remove an entity that stops behaving like one. Every measure repeatedly proposed shifts the test from whether a party exists on paper to whether it seeks votes. Whether Parliament is willing to give the Election Commission that power, having left the position untouched since the Court described the gap, is what decides the outcome.

    Back2Basics: Recognition of political parties in India

    1. Who decides: The Election Commission recognises a party as a State party or a national party under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968.
    2. State party test: Recognition in a State requires a fixed share of valid votes together with seats in the Assembly or the Lok Sabha from that State, or a minimum number of Lok Sabha seats from it.
    3. National party test: Recognition as a national party requires recognition as a State party in at least four States, or a fixed vote share along with Lok Sabha seats from several States.
    4. What recognition brings: A recognised party gets a reserved symbol, free broadcast time on public service media, a larger number of star campaigners and copies of the electoral roll.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”

  • Uttarakhand voter-deletion puzzle: Why 4 plains districts account for 85% of Form-7s

    Why in the News

    Four plains districts of Uttarakhand account for more than 85 per cent of the 1,30,382 Form 7 deletion applications filed during the claims and objections period of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Udham Singh Nagar filed 43,878, Haridwar 29,369, Dehradun 19,402 and Nainital 18,301, against 382 in Rudraprayag. The concentration is read two ways: the ruling party attributes it to migration and border movement, the Opposition to the minority and Scheduled Caste composition of those districts. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has meanwhile disposed of only a third of the applications and has pushed the claims and objections deadline back by nineteen days.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. A rebuild rather than an update: The roll is drawn afresh instead of being amended, so an existing elector is placed on a draft roll and re-established on it before the final roll is notified.
    2. The claims and objections window: A fixed period after the draft roll opens the roll to applications for inclusion, correction and deletion, and is the only stage at which an entry can be contested.
    3. The deletion form: Form 7 is the application seeking removal of a name, filed either by the elector concerned or by any other elector objecting to that entry.

    Where is the deletion demand concentrated?

    1. The four plains districts: Udham Singh Nagar, Haridwar, Dehradun and Nainital together account for over 85 per cent of the 1,30,382 Form 7 applications filed in the State.
    2. The hill districts barely register: Pauri Garhwal recorded 5,424 applications, Pithoragarh 3,044, Almora 2,999, Uttarkashi 2,109, Champawat 1,723, Chamoli 1,702 and Tehri Garhwal 1,431.
    3. The floor of the distribution: Bagheshwar recorded 618 applications and Rudraprayag 382, against Udham Singh Nagar’s 43,878.

    Why do the two sides read the same numbers differently?

    1. The migration explanation: Uttarakhand’s Minister for Minority Affairs attributed the concentration to the four districts being the State’s largest and most mobile urban centres, where people move while retaining electoral records at their previous locations.
    2. The targeting allegation: The Congress said it does not oppose the revision itself but objects to the manner of deletion, alleging that the affected seats are those with larger Muslim, minority, poor, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe populations.
    3. The rejection of a communal reading: The State minister rejected the suggestion that any minority was being targeted, resting the pattern on cross border movement of people alone.
    4. The Commission declines to interpret: The ECI’s stated position is that the figures record only applications received, and that district totals can vary with how actively individuals examined the roll.

    Can the machinery dispose of what has been filed?

    1. The disposal shortfall: Of the 1,30,382 applications received between 14 July and 13 August, only 44,132 had been disposed of as of 7 September, leaving 86,250 under process.
    2. Pendency follows the same map: Udham Singh Nagar has 34,903 applications under process, Haridwar 17,554, Nainital 11,498 and Dehradun 11,262.
    3. The schedule has moved: The claims and objections deadline has been extended from 9 September to 28 September, with the final electoral roll now due on 3 October.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. Deletion volume outruns adjudication capacity: Each Form 7 requires an inquiry and a hearing before a name is struck, and a single electoral registration officer cannot run tens of thousands of them inside a notified window. Eg. Udham Singh Nagar carries 34,903 undisposed applications against a district electoral machinery sized for routine annual revision.
      The Fix: Publish a per district disposal rate through the window, so a shortfall is visible in time for the schedule to be corrected rather than after the final roll is notified.
    2. A rebuilt roll shifts the burden onto the elector: A revision that does not carry the previous roll forward requires every elector to act, which falls hardest on those least able to track a draft publication. Eg. Circular migrant workers absent from their registered address through the claims window have no practical way to contest a deletion entry.
      The Fix: Require a documented delivery of individual notice to the registered address before any deletion is confirmed, rather than treating draft roll publication as sufficient notice.
    3. Bulk objections are not distinguished from individual ones: The form makes no distinction between an elector correcting their own record and a third party objecting to another elector’s entry, so the two are counted and processed alike. Eg. The State’s own figures report only totals received, with no breakdown of who filed them.
      The Fix: Record and publish the filer category on every Form 7, so a concentration of third party objections is identifiable in the data itself.
    4. No published reason code for a deletion: A name removed as a duplicate, a name removed on death and a name removed as a non resident are all recorded as a deletion, so the roll’s shrinkage cannot be audited. Eg. The Uttarakhand figures allow no test of the migration explanation against the targeting allegation, which is why both survive the same dataset.
      The Fix: Attach a mandatory statutory reason code to every deletion order and publish the code wise totals alongside the final roll.

    Conclusion

    The Uttarakhand figures do not settle the dispute they have started. The same distribution supports a migration reading and a targeting reading, and the Commission has declined to choose between them because the data records applications rather than outcomes. The test now sits in the disposal record: 86,250 applications have to be decided before 28 September, and the final roll is due on 3 October.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS2, 10.0 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?”

  • Draft SIR list shows anomalies, absurdities. Independent audit is needed

    Why in the News

    An analysis of the Election Commission of India’s draft rolls finds that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has removed 13.37 crore names at the draft stage. The revision began as a pilot in Bihar, where 65 lakh names were deleted, and has since run across the country in three phases. Deletion rates have risen with each phase rather than falling. India’s electorate stood at about 98 crore at the 2024 Lok Sabha election, against an adult voting-age population of about 99 crore. The electorate is projected to fall to about 88 crore against a projected adult population of 103 crore. Either the population projection or the electoral roll is badly wrong.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. A house-to-house verification: The Special Intensive Revision is a time-bound enumeration in which Booth Level Officers visit each household and verify every existing entry on the roll.
    2. Different from the annual revision: The routine summary revision only processes claims and objections that voters themselves file. The intensive revision re-verifies the entire roll on the ground.
    3. The sequence: Enumeration produces a draft roll. Claims and objections against that draft are then decided before a final roll is published.

    What do the national numbers show?

    1. The expected final figure: Publication of a draft roll is usually followed by more additions than deletions. Final deletions are estimated at over 11.5 crore once the remaining States are counted in.
    2. What is still outstanding: Draft rolls have not been released for Nagaland and Tripura. The revision has not begun in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
    3. The scale against the early warning: An early projection that a nationwide revision could delete up to 10 crore names was dismissed when it was made. The draft-stage figure has already passed it.

    What explains the gap between the electorate and the adult population?

    1. Only two readings are available: Either the official population projection is far too high, at under 125 crore rather than the projected figure above 145 crore. Or close to 15 crore voting-age Indians are absent from the roll.
    2. Correct deletions do not settle it: The pre-revision roll carried accumulated errors and spurious names, so a majority of the deletions may well be correct. A wrongful share of even one third still leaves an unacceptable number of voters removed.
    3. Under-enfranchisement is the other half: Eligible voters who never appeared on the pre-revision roll, those struck off before the revision started, and young voters who should have been added during it are all outside the count. The revision was not designed to find any of them.

    How have the three phases differed?

    1. Phase one, Bihar: Deletions of 65 lakh amounted to a fall of under 8 per cent in the elector-to-population ratio (the electorate expressed as a share of the adult population). Judicial scrutiny brought the final figure down to 45 lakh.
    2. Phase two, 13 States: Deletions reached nearly 13 per cent of the roll, totalling 6.5 crore. Public attention concentrated on the targeted removal of Muslim voters in West Bengal.
    3. Phase three, the rest of the country: Deletions in the draft rolls crossed 17 per cent, totalling 6.1 crore. The phase followed a Supreme Court order that left the Commission free to proceed.
    4. The direction of travel: Each phase recorded a higher deletion rate than the phase before it, and each attracted less scrutiny than the phase before it.

    Which States account for the largest deletions?

    1. Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra lead: Uttar Pradesh recorded 2.9 crore deletions and Maharashtra 2.1 crore.
    2. The next tier: Karnataka recorded 1.08 crore, Tamil Nadu 97.4 lakh, Gujarat 73.7 lakh and West Bengal 58.2 lakh.
    3. Mid-sized States: Delhi recorded 47.6 lakh, Andhra Pradesh 44.9 lakh, Jharkhand 43.6 lakh, Madhya Pradesh 42.7 lakh, Rajasthan 41.9 lakh and Haryana 33.9 lakh.
    4. Smaller totals: Chhattisgarh recorded 27.1 lakh, Kerala 24.1 lakh, Punjab 20.7 lakh, Odisha 20.1 lakh and Uttarakhand 8.3 lakh.
    5. Where the rate is abnormal: Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Delhi recorded deletion rates well above the pattern for their phase.
    6. What the table excludes: Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya and the Union Territories are left out because population projections are unavailable for them. The projections used are drawn from the Report of the Technical Group on Population Projections of July 2020.

    Why are the deletion categories the core of the problem?

    1. Deaths are a small and stable share: Voters marked “dead” held steady at around 3 per cent of total deletions across all three phases.
    2. The two large categories are undefined: Most deletions were recorded as “absent” or “shifted”. Neither term has been defined so far, and local electoral officials have applied both at their own discretion.
    3. A further fifth is flagged rather than resolved: About one-fifth of the remaining electors face further scrutiny as “unmapped” or under “logical discrepancy”. No standard operating procedure states how such a flag is to be decided.
    4. The flag clusters oddly: Odisha, Jharkhand and Telangana show unusually high shares of “logical discrepancy”. A uniform software check applied across States would not produce that distribution.

    What happens to a voter deleted before the revision starts?

    1. No enumeration form is ever issued: A voter removed before the revision formally begins never receives an enumeration form. That removal is not counted as a revision deletion at all.
    2. The scale of pre-revision removals: Over 14 lakh such deletions took place between 12 May, when the third phase schedule was announced, and the day that phase formally began. Over 8 lakh of them were in Maharashtra.
    3. Delhi is the clearest case: Delhi lost more than 11 lakh voters before the revision was launched, counting from its assembly election in February the previous year. Its roll then fell from 1.56 crore to 98 lakh after the draft was published.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. The burden of proof sits on the voter: The exercise requires an elector to establish entitlement rather than requiring the state to establish ineligibility. Eg. Electors in Bihar were asked to produce legacy documents such as a parent’s entry in an earlier intensive revision roll.
      The Fix: Place the burden on the electoral registration officer to record a written ground and serve notice before any name is struck off.
    2. Field officers carry unworkable targets: Verifying every household within a few weeks exceeds the staff assigned to the task. Eg. Deaths and suicides among Booth Level Officers were reported during the West Bengal phase.
      The Fix: Fix a maximum number of households per officer and extend the enumeration window instead of compressing verification into the deletion window.
    3. Grievance redress runs slower than the roll: Claims and objections are decided after the deadline that freezes the roll for an approaching election. Eg. Only a fraction of the claims filed in West Bengal were disposed of before the roll was frozen.
      The Fix: Bar publication of a final roll until every claim against the draft carries a written and appealable order.
    4. Deletion data is not published in usable form: Rolls are released as image files, so any independent count of deletions has to be reconstructed by hand. Eg. The national deletion total here had to be assembled State by State from separately published draft rolls.
      The Fix: Publish booth-level deletion lists carrying the recorded ground for each name, in a downloadable machine-readable format.

    Conclusion

    The revision was justified as a clean-up and is producing a shrinking electorate. A roll that removes names far faster than it adds them cannot be defended as an accuracy exercise, and the Commission cannot certify its own accuracy. What is contested is not whether errors existed on the old roll but whether their correction followed any stated rule. An audit by a body outside the Commission is the only thing that would settle that, and nothing in the current process provides for one.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Electoral Roll Revision

    1. Article 324: Vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections in the Election Commission of India.
    2. Article 325: Mandates one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency and bars exclusion from it on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
    3. Article 326: Provides for universal adult suffrage, with the voting age lowered to 18 by the Sixty-first Amendment.
    4. Article 327: Empowers Parliament to legislate on all matters relating to elections, including the preparation of electoral rolls.
    5. Article 329: Bars courts from questioning an electoral law or a completed election except through an election petition.

    Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Roll Revision

    1. Representation of the People Act, 1950: Provides for the allocation of seats and for the preparation and revision of electoral rolls.
    2. Section 19: Sets the conditions for registration, being 18 years of age and ordinarily resident in the constituency.
    3. Section 21: Authorises the Commission to order a special revision of a roll at any time, for reasons recorded in writing.
    4. Section 16: Lists the disqualifications for registration, including non-citizenship and unsoundness of mind.
    5. Section 31: Penalises a false declaration made in connection with the preparation or revision of a roll.
    6. Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Lay down the procedure for house-to-house enumeration, publication of the draft roll, and disposal of claims and objections.
    7. Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the conduct of elections and confines a challenge to a completed election to an election petition before the High Court.

    Government Initiatives for Electoral Roll Management

    1. ECINET: A single digital interface launched in 2026 that consolidates more than 40 separate Commission applications used by voters and officials.
    2. National Voters’ Services Portal: Allows a voter to register, correct and verify roll details online without visiting a registration centre.
    3. Electors Photo Identity Card delivery standard: A revised operating procedure requires an updated identity card to reach the elector within 15 days of an update.
    4. Common electoral roll proposal: A single roll for parliamentary, assembly and local body elections, intended to end the parallel rolls maintained separately by State Election Commissions.

    Key Facts about Electoral Roll Revision

    1. National Voters’ Day: Observed on 25 January each year, marking the founding of the Election Commission in 1950.
    2. Frequency of intensive revision: An intensive revision of this kind has been carried out about 14 times, with earlier rounds in 1983, 1995, 2002 and 2004.
    3. The first rolls: The first intensive revisions ran between 1952 and 1956 to build the country’s first reliable voter database.
    4. Qualifying dates: Since the 2021 amendment to the election laws, a person turning 18 may register with reference to any of four qualifying dates in a year, 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October.

    Way Forward

    1. Link the roll to the civil registration system: Automatic removal of deceased electors through the death register would take the largest legitimate deletion category out of field discretion entirely.
    2. Permanent electoral tribunals: A standing tribunal for roll disputes would replace the temporary appellate arrangements assembled around each revision.
    3. Geo-tagged field verification: Recording each house visit with a location and time stamp would make a claimed visit checkable after the fact.

    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?”

  • 1.85 lakh names out of Manipur, Sikkim poll rolls after SIR

    Why in the News

    The Election Commission of India has published the final photo electoral rolls of Manipur and Sikkim following the Special Intensive Revision. The revision removed 1,32,456 names in Manipur and 52,614 in Sikkim, 1.85 lakh in all, amounting to 6.3 per cent of the Manipur roll and 11.2 per cent of the Sikkim roll. The bulk of the removals were not adjudicated findings of ineligibility. They followed from enumeration forms that were never received in Manipur and from electors who could not be matched to an earlier roll in Sikkim. Kuki-Zo groups have said that community members displaced by the ethnic conflict that erupted on 3 May 2023 stand to be struck off, and the government has sought to dispel that apprehension.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision?

    1. The roll is rebuilt rather than carried forward: An intensive revision generates an enumeration form for every existing elector and requires it back, in place of the summary practice of amending the previous roll.
    2. A form not returned means a name not carried: An elector whose form is not received is excluded from the draft roll at the outset, before any question of eligibility is examined.
    3. Claims and objections follow the draft: The draft roll is published, claims and objections are filed and processed within a fixed window, and the final photo electoral roll issues after that.

    What do the Manipur numbers show?

    1. The roll shrank by 1,32,456: Manipur held 20,93,076 electors before the revision and holds 19,60,620 after it.
    2. The draft did the deleting: The draft roll published on 5 July carried 19,34,399 electors, against 1,58,677 whose enumeration forms were not received and who were excluded at that stage.
    3. The exclusion heads: Of those excluded, 72,473 were identified as shifted, 43,000 as deceased, 34,740 as absent, 7,394 as duplicate entries and 1,070 under other categories.
    4. The claims stage added more than it removed: 96,985 claims and objections were processed, 56,871 electors were included and 30,650 were deleted from the draft roll.

    What do the Sikkim numbers show?

    1. The roll shrank by 52,614: Sikkim held 4,71,081 electors before the revision and holds 4,18,467 after it.
    2. Mapping decided who was questioned: Of the 4,33,294 electors in the July draft, 3,61,159 or 83.35 per cent were mapped to their own or their parents’ details in a previous qualifying roll or the last revision. The remaining 72,135, or 16.65 per cent, could not be mapped.
    3. A digital flag added a second category: Among the mapped electors the Election Commission’s system identified 52,384 as carrying “logical discrepancies”.
    4. Notices ran far ahead of findings: 1,24,519 electors from the unmapped and discrepancy categories were issued notices for hearings, and 16,485 were found ineligible after verification.
    5. A separate deletion route: Another 324 electors were deleted through Form 7 on grounds including death or shifting, taking deletions during claims and objections to 16,809.

    Why do the Kuki-Zo objections matter to these figures?

    1. Displacement and shifting look identical on the roll: The largest single exclusion head in Manipur is 72,473 electors recorded as shifted, and internal displacement is precisely what produces an elector who is not found at a registered address.
    2. The instrument has no displaced category: A person living in a relief camp is neither a resident at the registered address nor an elector anywhere else, and the enumeration exercise offers no third classification.
    3. The apprehension preceded the exercise: Kuki-Zo groups raised the fear both before and during the revision, and the assurance offered was administrative rather than a change in the classification rules.

    What does the composition of the final rolls show?

    1. Manipur’s roll is majority women: 10,06,962 women electors against 9,53,350 men, a ratio of 1,056 women for every 1,000 men, alongside 308 third gender electors.
    2. Sikkim’s roll runs the other way: 2,12,534 men against 2,05,931 women, with two third gender electors.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. The burden of proof moves onto the elector: A person already on the roll must re-establish entitlement rather than have it presumed. Eg. In the Bihar revision of 2025, Aadhaar did not figure among the documents initially listed for establishing eligibility.
      The Fix: Fix the admissible document list before the enumeration begins and bar additions or subtractions to it mid-exercise.
    2. Migrant and displaced electors are structurally disadvantaged: Enumeration works from a fixed address, and a seasonal migrant or a person in a relief camp has none for the reference period. Eg. An elector sheltering after the 2023 Manipur conflict cannot register at the camp and cannot be enumerated at home.
      The Fix: Recognise a relief camp or worksite address as ordinary residence for the duration of the revision.
    3. Deletion takes effect before an appeal is decided: A name goes off the roll on the officer’s finding, and the appeal runs afterwards. Eg. Appeals against inclusion or exclusion lie to the District Magistrate and then the Chief Electoral Officer under Section 24 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
      The Fix: Suspend the deletion until the statutory appeal window closes, so the roll reflects a final decision.
    4. A deleted elector has no automatic route back: Restoration is a fresh application rather than a correction of the same file. Eg. An elector deleted as absent must apply again under Form 6 to be re-enrolled.
      The Fix: Restore a name automatically on production of proof within the same revision cycle, without a fresh application.

    Conclusion

    The revision has produced a smaller and internally consistent roll, and it has not produced a finding that 1.85 lakh people were ineligible to vote. Two different tests are being reported as one: a documentary test of whether a form came back or a record could be matched, and a substantive test of citizenship, age and residence. The exercise is now closed in both States and the appeal machinery is the only route left for a person struck off. Whether that machinery can absorb objections at this scale, in a State where a section of the electorate has been displaced for three years, is the open question.

    Back2Basics: Revision of electoral rolls under the Representation of the People Act, 1950

    1. Statutory basis: Section 21 empowers the Election Commission to prepare and revise electoral rolls, either as a matter of course before an election or by special direction.
    2. Two modes of revision: An intensive revision prepares the roll afresh through house-to-house enumeration. A summary revision carries the existing roll forward and invites claims and objections against it.
    3. The forms: Form 6 seeks inclusion of a name, Form 7 objects to an inclusion or seeks a deletion, and Form 8 covers correction of particulars and transposition within a constituency.
    4. Qualifying dates: Eligibility is tested with reference to 1 January, with 1 April, 1 July and 1 October added as further qualifying dates from 2022.

    [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?”

  • Why is the Centre opposed to totalisers?

    Why in the News

    A three judge Bench of the Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice of India has asked the Central government to examine introducing totaliser machines for counting votes recorded in Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), in order to protect the secrecy of booth-wise voting patterns and prevent electors at individual booths from being identified and victimised. The direction was given on September 1, 2026, on a public interest petition filed in 2014 by Yogesh Gupta and Imran Khan seeking that votes cast at the various polling stations in a constituency be mixed before counting. The Election Commission of India has supported the measure since 2008 and has recommended it to the Union government. The Centre has opposed it throughout, arguing at different points that booth-wise disclosure causes no intimidation and that a totaliser could leak data before counting begins. The tension is between the secrecy of the ballot at the level of a locality and the granular booth data that campaigns and the administration both now rely on.

    What is a totaliser?

    1. What it does: A totaliser allows the votes cast in about 14 polling booths to be counted together, against the present practice of tallying votes booth by booth.
    2. How it connects: It is an interface connected to the main control unit of a cluster of 14 EVMs.
    3. What it outputs: Pressing the result button gives the consolidated votes polled by each candidate across the 14 machines, without revealing the voting pattern of any individual polling area.
    4. Who built it: It was developed by Bharat Electronics Limited, Bengaluru and Electronics Corporation of India Limited, Hyderabad.

    Why was the petition filed?

    1. The stated purpose: The petitioners sought a direction to the poll panel to mix the votes cast at various polling stations in a constituency, on the ground that this was necessary to stop candidates intimidating voters in areas that had rebuffed them.
    2. The illustration offered: The petitioners cited alleged intimidation by a late former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra in the Baramati constituency during the last general election, where voters were allegedly threatened that his party would detect voting patterns from the EVM readings and cut off their water supply.
    3. Booths map onto communities: Polling booths in India are marked geographically, so where social groups live in segregated clusters, which is the case across much of rural India and increasingly in urban slums, a booth result roughly identifies how a numerically large community voted.
    4. The risk has grown since 2014: Advanced geospatial tools now allow booth trends to be correlated with social settings and causal inferences to be drawn from that correlation, which goes beyond what the petitioners feared when they filed.

    What has been the Centre’s position?

    1. The 2017 argument, that there is no harm: The Centre told the apex court that identifying booth-wise voting patterns did not lead to voter intimidation and that there was no need to stop the disclosure of booth-wise results.
    2. The 2017 argument, that there is a benefit: It contended that knowledge of booth-wise vote shares allowed candidates to work harder in areas where support for them was low, producing better results for everyone involved.
    3. The 2018 argument, that the machine is the risk: The Additional Solicitor General told the Bench, then led by the Chief Justice of India, that installing a totaliser could lead to a data breach even before vote counting began.
    4. The ministerial decision on record: A Law Ministry affidavit told the Court that a group of ministers headed by the then Union Home Minister had decided that intimidation or victimisation of voters as apprehended may not occur on a larger scale in this era of media activism.

    What is the Election Commission’s stand?

    1. Consistent support since 2008: The poll body first suggested the measure to the United Progressive Alliance government in 2008 and has recommended the totaliser system to the Union government since.
    2. The 2018 submission: It told the Supreme Court that a time has come for introduction of the totaliser for counting of the votes.
    3. The position in the current hearings: Counsel for the Commission backed the goal of protecting voter anonymity, and that support has carried into the present round.
    4. The caveats it has entered: It flagged practical and legal difficulties in implementing the proposal, including how booth-wise verification would work and how the exercise interacts with the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), the printer attached to a voting unit that shows the elector a paper slip of the vote cast before it drops into a sealed box.

    What has the Court now directed?

    1. The direction to the Centre: The Court asked the Central government to state its position on introducing a totaliser system for counting votes recorded through EVMs.
    2. The specific questions: It sought to know whether there are any impediments to introducing such a mechanism and whether there would be any negative impact from it.
    3. The deadline on the data breach point: The Centre’s repetition of the data breach apprehension prompted the Court to give the Election Commission two weeks to respond to that fear.
    4. The parallel instruction: The Commission has also been asked to submit its proposal to the government, which moves the question from litigation into an executive decision.

    Challenges to introducing the totaliser

    1. Booth level data has administrative uses beyond campaigning: Turnout and result data at the polling station is what flags a station for scrutiny or a re-poll. Eg. An implausibly high turnout at a single station is the standard trigger for ordering a re-poll there.
      The Fix: Retain booth-wise data with the Election Commission for audit and re-poll decisions, and publish only the aggregated cluster result.
    2. A re-poll cannot be isolated once votes are mixed: If the machines of 14 booths have been aggregated, a re-poll ordered at one of them cannot be separated from the counted total. Eg. Re-polls after booth capturing or machine failure are ordered station by station, not cluster by cluster.
      The Fix: Run the totaliser only after every re-poll in the constituency is complete and the machines are back in the strongroom.
    3. Slip verification is anchored to the polling station: The mandatory VVPAT count is done for randomly selected polling stations and compared against that station’s electronic count, which presumes station-wise totals exist. Eg. The Supreme Court’s direction requires slip counting in five randomly selected polling stations in each assembly segment.
      The Fix: Complete the station-wise slip verification first and aggregate through the totaliser only after the match is recorded.
    4. Clustering does not conceal a pattern in a homogeneous area: Where one community occupies most of a 14 booth cluster, the aggregate reveals its voting pattern as clearly as a single booth would. Eg. Reserved constituencies with geographically concentrated settlements would gain little anonymity from aggregation.
      The Fix: Form clusters across socially mixed areas rather than across contiguous ones, so no single cluster maps onto a single community.
    5. The Commission cannot act alone: Counting procedure is governed by the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, and the mixing provision presently covers ballot papers rather than voting machines. Eg. Rule 59A permits mixing of ballot papers before counting in specified elections and does not extend to EVMs.
      The Fix: Amend Rule 59A to extend the existing mixing provision to electronic voting machines, which is the single step that converts the recommendation into a usable power.

    Conclusion

    The Election Commission has backed this measure across successive governments and it has still not been introduced, because the decision sits with the Centre and not with the poll body. The objection now on record has shifted from denying that booth-level victimisation happens to warning that the counting device itself is insecure, which is a question about design and custody rather than about whether ballot secrecy is worth extending to a locality. The Centre’s reply to the Court and the Commission’s fresh proposal to the government are the two documents that decide whether the proposal moves this time.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “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?”

  • Voter lists shrink by 15.7% in 17 States and U.T.s after SIR

    Why in the News

    Draft electoral rolls published after the third phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) show the electorate in 17 States and Union Territories falling 15.7 per cent, from 35,50,50,008 at the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to 29,93,00,115. Maharashtra recorded the largest drop in absolute numbers at 15,896,198 electors, or 17.08 per cent, and Delhi and Chandigarh the sharpest percentage falls at 35.89 per cent and 31.84 per cent. The revision rebuilds the roll rather than updating it, so an elector’s presence on the previous roll does not by itself carry them onto the new one. Of the 6.15 crore electors deleted in this phase, 1.11 crore are marked dead, and the remainder are recorded as absent, multiply enrolled or in an others category. The contest is over that remainder, since absence at the moment of verification is not the same thing as ineligibility.

    What happened to the rolls between the 2024 polls and the revision?

    1. The rolls first grew: Between the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the cut-off date for the enumeration phase, these States and Union Territories added around 57.75 lakh electors, taking the cumulative total to 36,08,07,394.
    2. One State drove most of the addition: Maharashtra added 47.92 lakh electors, and ten other States including Haryana added about 9.83 lakh between them.
    3. Six States and Union Territories moved the other way: Delhi’s roll fell from 1,52,14,638 at the polls to 1,45,10,299 before the revision, a drop of more than 7 lakh.
    4. The other five declines: Uttarakhand fell by 4.7 lakh, Odisha by 3.17 lakh, Chandigarh by 1.44 lakh, Punjab by 1.1 lakh and Arunachal Pradesh by 10,937.

    What are the deletions made of?

    1. Death is the smaller share: Of the 6.15 crore electors deleted, 1.11 crore are marked dead, which is the only category that is verifiable against an independent record.
    2. Absence is the largest category: 4.52 crore electors are marked absent, meaning the enumerator did not find them at the registered address during the field round.
    3. Duplicate registration: 49.58 lakh are recorded as having multiple enrolments, which removes a name from one roll rather than removing the person from the electorate.
    4. The residual: Around 3 lakh fall into an others category that the draft does not break down further.

    Where does the exercise now stand?

    1. The current phase: The third phase covers 16 States and three Union Territories. Draft rolls have been published for 17 of them, with Nagaland due on September 20 and Tripura on October 21.
    2. Final rolls begin: The rollout of final lists starts with Mizoram, Sikkim and Manipur on September 6, and the numbers in the final lists can rise, since the Election Commission provides a window for claims and objections and for registration of new voters.
    3. Already completed: The revision is over in Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Goa, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.
    4. Assam is on a different track: A special revision was conducted there instead, because of legal questions connected to the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the Assam-specific register of citizens prepared under Supreme Court supervision.
    5. What remains: With the third phase, the exercise covers the entire country except Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, whose schedule is to be announced later.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. The largest deletion category is the least verifiable: An elector recorded as absent may be a migrant worker away for the season rather than a person who has moved permanently. Eg. Out-migration from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar peaks between sowing and harvest, which is when field verification is conducted.
      The Fix: Accept a claim filed remotely from a declared work address, with the home address retained, before a deletion on grounds of absence is confirmed.
    2. The remedy reaches the wrong address: The claims and objections window opens after publication and depends on the elector learning of the deletion, and notices are served at the registered address the elector was not found at. Eg. A household away for work misses both the enumeration visit and the notice that follows it.
      The Fix: Require the booth level officer to record a served notice and one repeat attempt before any absence-based deletion becomes final.
    3. The burden of proof inverts: In an intensive revision the existing roll stops being evidence of eligibility, so an elector already enrolled must establish the claim again. Eg. Electors absent from the previous intensive revision roll have had to produce documentary proof of eligibility rather than relying on their existing entry.
      The Fix: Treat the previous roll as presumptive evidence, and require the Electoral Registration Officer to record a specific ground before displacing that presumption.
    4. Field capacity is thin at the point where accuracy is decided: A single booth level officer covers a polling station of up to 1,500 electors within a fixed enumeration window. Eg. The verification and the draft publication in this phase ran across 19 States and Union Territories simultaneously.
      The Fix: Publish the per-officer elector load and the number of verification visits made, so the quality of the field round can be audited rather than assumed.

    Conclusion

    The draft numbers are not the final numbers. The claims and objections window decides whether an elector deleted in absence returns to the roll, and its use depends on people who are away learning that they were removed. A revision that removes duplicate entries and a revision that removes voters produce the same headline figure and are not the same event. The final lists are where the two become distinguishable.

    Back2Basics: Special Intensive Revision

    1. An intensive revision rebuilds the electoral roll from scratch, enumerating every elector afresh, rather than adding and deleting names at the margin as a summary revision does.
    2. It is conducted by the Election Commission of India under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.
    3. The sequence is fixed: house-to-house enumeration, publication of a draft roll, a window for claims and objections, then publication of the final roll.
    4. The last countrywide intensive revision was carried out in 2002-03, and revisions since then have been summary revisions.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “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?”

  • Presumed guilty, SIR’s spreading stain

    Why in the News

    An investigation into four booths in Godda, Jharkhand has documented Bharatiya Janata Party workers filing Form 7 objections in bulk, seeking deletion of names from the draft electoral rolls. Many of the voters marked for deletion had already submitted the required documents. Others had lived in the same house for generations or were mapped onto the 2003 rolls. The booths sit inside the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, an exercise that has produced 13 crore deletions nationwide. An inquiry has been ordered into the Godda booths. The contest is over who must prove what: roll maintenance is a routine statutory duty, and a revision that asks a voter to establish belonging converts it into a test of citizenship.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. A full re-verification, not a routine update: The Election Commission of India (ECI) requires an existing voter to submit fresh documentary proof of eligibility, in place of the ordinary practice of adding and deleting names on application.
    2. Form 7 is the deletion instrument: Under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, Form 7 allows an objection to a proposed inclusion, an objection to an existing name, or a request for deletion.
    3. An earlier intensive roll is the baseline: A voter traceable to the 2003 rolls is treated as verified, and every other voter must produce documents afresh.

    What did the Godda booths reveal about how deletions are sought?

    1. Bulk objections came from workers of one party: Form 7s were submitted in lots at a minimum of four booths, producing a standoff between election officials and Bharatiya Janata Party workers.
    2. Compliance did not protect a voter: Names of people who had filed the required documents, or who were mapped onto the earlier intensive roll, still appeared on the objection lists.
    3. The pattern points at a specific set of voters: Objections filed in bulk raise the concern of deletion aimed at minority voters rather than at genuine duplication or migration.
    4. An inquiry is the response so far: Officials ordered an inquiry after the report, and no change has been made to how third party objections are received.

    How does the revision shift the burden of proof onto the voter?

    1. The voter answers an accusation she was never served: The exercise asks her to establish belonging, in place of requiring the objector to establish ineligibility.
    2. The documents demanded are hard to access: Proof of the kind sought is least available to the poorest and the least documented households.
    3. The deadlines are unrealistic: The window to respond is shorter than the time it takes to obtain a record from a revenue or municipal office.
    4. The process itself is the penalty: A voter finally retained on the roll has still spent days, travel and money defending a name she already held.

    Where does the Supreme Court’s role in the exercise now stand?

    1. It intervened in Bihar: The Court directed the Commission to accept Aadhaar as acceptable proof. It also nudged the Commission toward recording reasons for a deletion.
    2. It stepped back in West Bengal: The Court gave the Commission the benefit of every doubt and did not press the questions the exercise had raised.
    3. The added layers do not close the process: Micro-observers, judicial officers, a bulky under adjudication list and 19 appellate tribunals were set up too late and carry no deadline, so the appellate process runs on after polling ends.
    4. Exclusion carries no defined consequence: A deleted voter is told nothing about what follows, whether detention, deportation, denial of benefits, prolonged litigation or reapplication.

    What does criticism from within the electoral establishment add?

    1. Legality is being separated from fairness: A former Election Commissioner described the revision as legal but not fair, and located justice in the spirit of the law rather than its letter.
    2. The critique names the judiciary alongside the Commission: Statutory institutions and constitutional bodies were described as acting on a might is right basis, with the judiciary validating the result.
    3. Participation is the cost being incurred: About 33 percent of the electorate already does not vote, and anxiety over the roll adds a fresh reason to disengage.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. No threshold governs a third party objection: The Rules fix no limit on how many Form 7 objections one person may file and no standard of scrutiny before a name is acted on. Eg. Bihar’s revision produced a draft roll from which about 65 lakh names were dropped in a single cycle.
      The Fix: Cap objections per objector per booth and require a recorded hearing before any deletion made on a third party objection.
    2. Documentary proof excludes the least documented: A verification standard built on legacy papers falls hardest on people who never received them. Eg. The National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam left about 19 lakh people off the final list in 2019, largely on documentary grounds.
      The Fix: Treat a name on the immediately preceding final roll as presumptive proof, so the objector carries the burden of displacing it.
    3. The statutory appeal has no disposal clock: Section 24 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 provides an appeal to the District Magistrate and then to the Chief Electoral Officer, without a fixed period for decision. Eg. The Bengal appellate tribunals will decide claims after the votes have been counted.
      The Fix: Fix a statutory disposal period ending before the last date for nominations, with the name restored by default if it lapses.
    4. Migrant workers are structurally exposed: A voter absent from the constituency during verification cannot answer an objection filed against her. Eg. Census 2011 recorded about 45 crore internal migrants in India.
      The Fix: Allow verification through a designated relative or a digital filing that returns a dated acknowledgement.
    5. Deletions are published as counts, not as reasons: The Commission reports how many names were removed and not the category of ground on which each was removed. Eg. A household learns of a deletion from the published roll rather than from a served notice.
      The Fix: Publish booth level deletion grounds in a machine readable form, so a pattern is visible before an election rather than after it.

    Conclusion

    An electoral roll needs continuous cleaning and updating, and that is not in dispute. The dispute is over who carries the burden of proof, and over what a voter is owed when she cannot discharge it. The tests to watch are two: whether the Commission is required to record a reason for every deletion, and whether an excluded voter receives a final decision before polling rather than after it.

    Back2Basics

    1. The Representation of the People Act, 1950 provides for the allocation of seats in Parliament and the State legislatures, the delimitation of constituencies, and the qualifications of voters.
    2. It is the statute under which electoral rolls are prepared and revised, with the machinery of electoral registration officers and booth level machinery drawn from it.
    3. Section 21 empowers the Election Commission to direct a special revision of an electoral roll for any constituency, for reasons to be recorded.
    4. Section 24 provides the appeal against an inclusion or a deletion, first to the District Magistrate and then to the Chief Electoral Officer.

    [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?

  • Jharkhand SIR faceoff: BJP agents seek to delete voters, BLOs raise red flag

    Why in the News

    Booth Level Officers (BLOs) in at least four booths of Jharkhand’s Godda district have refused stacks of Form 7 applications seeking deletion of voters from the draft electoral roll, flagging them as not genuine or not procedurally sound. The applications were brought by Booth Level Agents (BLAs) of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and most of the names on them are from the minority community. The draft roll was published under the State’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), and the claims and objections round on it is still open. The BJP has complained that the BLOs are at fault for refusing the forms. BLOs are State government employees, and the State is governed by a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-Congress alliance, so the standoff has acquired a party colour and has reached the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO). The tension is that Form 7 requires no evidence and has no filing cap, so the only safeguard against targeted bulk deletion is the inquiry after intake, and the CEO and the local Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) disagree on whether a BLO may refuse a form at all.

    How is a Form 7 deletion supposed to work?

    1. The statutory power sits with the ERO: Section 22 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 lets the ERO correct or delete an entry on its own motion or on an application. In each case the ERO must hold an inquiry, give the elector time to respond and then pass an order.
    2. Only three grounds justify deletion: The ERO can remove an entry where the person has died, is no longer ordinarily resident in the constituency, or is ineligible because they are not a citizen or are under 18.
    3. Form 7 is the objection instrument: Under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, Form 7 carries an objection to a proposed inclusion or a deletion of a name in an existing roll. Any elector may use it to delete their own name or to object to another elector in the same constituency.
    4. The applicant proves nothing but signs a declaration: The form asks for one of five reasons, death, under age, absent or permanently shifted, already enrolled, or not Indian citizen, and needs no evidence. The applicant signs a declaration that a statement known to be false is punishable.

    Where does the online filing system leave the safeguard?

    1. Filing has moved online: The form can be downloaded from the voters’ portal and handed to the BLO, or filed on the portal or the ECINet app after the applicant links a phone number to their Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) number. Only a person registered in the same constituency can object to a name in it.
    2. The form identifies both parties: It carries the applicant’s name, EPIC number and phone number, and the name, EPIC number if available and address of the person objected to.
    3. Processing was centralised in 2018 but decisions were not: ERONet replaced the States’ own applications with one portal for EROs, and in 2025 the Election Commission of India (ECI) folded about 40 apps and portals into ECINet. Each form is still decided by the ERO concerned, not centrally.
    4. The portal verifies nothing at filing: No proof is required, and the system does not check that the EPIC number and phone number belong to the applicant.
    5. The inquiry is the safeguard, per the ECI: The ERO must issue a notice to the elector, allow seven days to respond, hold a hearing and pass an order, and the BLO must verify by a field visit. ECI officials say a deletion happens only after this ground inquiry.

    What did the investigation find in Godda’s booths?

    1. One BLA, 25 forms in one booth: At Booth No. 9 of Maheshtikri village a single BJP BLA filed Form 7s against 25 voters.
    2. The forms were not the official ones: The Maheshtikri BLO said the BLA brought forms that were not original, described them as covering voters absent from the village, and promised 50 more. Every form named a Muslim voter.
    3. She accepted the first batch and refused the rest: The BLO took the 25 forms, then declined further forms after the Block Development Officer (BDO) instructed BLOs that such documents were not official forms.
    4. A neighbouring BLA burned 75 forms: At Pachua Kita the BLO was handed around 75 Form 7s that differed from the forms the block office had issued. The BLA said he had been told they were for adding names, and he burned all of them when questioned.
    5. Almost every objected name was Muslim: At Pachua Kita almost all the names on the 75 forms were of Muslims, and at Maheshtikri all the forms carried Muslim voters.
    6. Complaints reached the ERO from four booths: The Basantrai BDO, acting as ERO, received complaints from Maheshtikri, Pachua Kita, Lochni and Baghakol. Villagers of Maheshtikri filed their own complaint against the mass objections in Booth No. 9.

    Why do the targeted voters say the objections cannot stand?

    1. The 2003 roll should protect them: Many of the targeted voters are verified in the 2003 intensive revision, and under the ECI’s own rules this eases their inclusion in the ongoing SIR. The BLOs said every objected voter at Maheshtikri and most at Pachua Kita were mapped to the 2003 roll.
    2. Residence runs back generations: The voters trace their families in the village across generations and hold the khatian, the land record used as proof of being Jharkhandi, along with Aadhaar cards and addresses in the State.
    3. Migration for work is the likely trigger: Several are labourers who work in Delhi, Ghaziabad or outside the State and return to vote in Jharkhand. One learned of the objection against him only from an anganwadi worker.
    4. The fear is benefits and citizenship, not only the vote: Eight voters spoken to feared disenfranchisement, loss of government scheme entitlements or being treated as non-citizens, and several said they were not educated enough to understand the consequences.
    5. Preliminary checks support them: The ERO said preliminary information shows some voters sought to be deleted are living at their registered addresses, and every deletion request will be field verified.

    How does the BJP defend the bulk filings?

    1. Objections are the BLA’s job: The former BJP MLA for Godda said filing objections is part of a BLA’s responsibility. BLAs are trained in Form 6 for new voters, Form 7 for objections and Form 8 for shifting or correction of entries.
    2. Duplicate registration is the stated ground: The party’s position is that a BLA can seek deletion where a name appears at two places, and that verifying the objection is the election authorities’ job.
    3. No cap exists on filings: There is no prescribed limit on the number of applications a BLA can submit, so a single BLA filing dozens breaks no rule.
    4. The BLO breached confidentiality, per the party: A BLO must keep the details of the objected person and of the BLA confidential, and disclosure can amount to a violation of the Representation of the People Act. The BJP says the Booth No. 9 BLO’s disclosure of its BLA’s identity caused pressure and threats against him.
    5. The complaint went to the Additional CEO: The BJP’s Jharkhand SIR convenor submitted a memorandum on discrepancies in the SIR, particularly in Sahibganj and Godda districts, accusing BLOs of two booths of refusing Form 7s from its BLAs.
    6. The BLAs describe a top down supply of forms: The Maheshtikri BLA said the former MLA gave him around 25 forms with the instruction to bring them back if the BLO refused, and some came back. The Pachua Kita BLA said he got the forms from party cadres, barely knew what they were, and thought they added names.

    Why have the ERO and the CEO split on what a BLO may do?

    1. The ERO told BLOs not to act: The BDO said BLOs were instructed not to act on the forms because the source of the forms was unknown, and that an inquiry report will follow field verification.
    2. The ERO wants a complaint route instead: In his view the BLAs should first have filed a written complaint with the Sub Divisional Officer (SDO) or the ERO asking for an investigation. Any objection should come from the family concerned or carry solid evidence.
    3. The CEO found no illegality: After speaking to the Godda Assistant ERO and the Deputy Commissioner, the Jharkhand CEO said objections were filed through Form 7 and can be submitted in bulk.
    4. The CEO holds that filing itself is legitimate: A BLA who believes a voter is registered in multiple States can object, and there is nothing wrong in filing objections.
    5. The CEO says BLOs cannot reject: The BLO must first inform the Assistant ERO (AERO), who decides what is to be done, and the BLO then records a recommendation in the observation report.

    Why has a roll revision become a party contest?

    1. The revision is large and the window is short: The SIR began in Jharkhand on June 30, and the draft roll published on August 5 removed 16.48 percent of voters, around 43 lakh. The claims and objections round closes on September 4.
    2. BLOs answer to a State government of the other side: The BJP frames the refusals as partisan because the BLOs are employees of a State run by its rivals.
    3. Godda is a marginal seat: The BJP candidate lost Godda in the 2024 Assembly election to the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) by more than 20,000 votes after winning it in 2020 by around 4,500.
    4. The ruling alliance calls it targeted deletion: The JMM’s local block president called the forms a BJP conspiracy to remove Muslim voters, and the Congress general secretary said the party is monitoring Form 7 deletions across the State. The RJD MLA for Godda said the BDO told him action is being taken.

    Challenges to the Form 7 objection mechanism

    1. The burden shifts to the objected elector: A voter must answer a notice within a week and attend a hearing, and a migrant worker away from home routinely misses both. Eg. In Lal Babu Hussein v Electoral Registration Officer (1995) the Supreme Court set aside deletions in Bombay where names had been struck off on suspicion of foreign nationality without a proper opportunity to be heard.
      The Fix: Serve the notice on the phone number linked to the elector’s EPIC and allow a response through the portal or a family member at the hearing.
    2. The objector’s identity is unverified: An objection can be filed under someone else’s EPIC number and phone number since nothing checks that they belong to the applicant. Eg. In Bengaluru in 2022, staff of a private firm, Chilume Enterprises, posed as Booth Level Officers and collected voter data door to door, showing how easily the intake layer is impersonated.
      The Fix: Require a one time password on the phone registered against the objector’s EPIC before the portal accepts a Form 7.
    3. False declarations carry no practical cost: Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 makes a false declaration punishable with imprisonment of up to one year, but prosecutions of objectors are rare, so bulk filing is free. Eg. In the Bihar SIR of 2025 the Supreme Court had to direct the ECI to publish booth wise lists of the about 65 lakh excluded names with reasons before any individual could contest an exclusion.
      The Fix: Track every rejected objection to its filer and prosecute repeat filers under Section 31.
    4. Party appointed agents drive the objection pipeline: BLAs are nominated by political parties, so the volume and targeting of objections follow party incentive rather than roll accuracy. Eg. The Bihar SIR of 2025 let each BLA submit up to 50 certified enumeration forms a day, formally placing party agents inside the roll’s verification chain.
      The Fix: Require the ERO to publish booth wise counts of objections by filer during the claims window so bulk targeting is visible before the roll is finalised.

    Conclusion

    The Godda dispute is about where the safeguard against targeted deletion sits, at the BLO’s counter or in the ERO’s inquiry. The CEO has ruled that intake cannot be refused, so every objection now goes to field verification. The marker to watch is the Basantrai ERO’s inquiry report and how many of the objections it upholds once the claims window closes.

    Back2Basics: Special Intensive Revision (SIR)

    1. Legal basis: Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 lets the Election Commission of India direct a special revision of the electoral roll for any constituency, in addition to the annual summary revision.
    2. What makes it intensive: BLOs visit every household with enumeration forms and the roll is rebuilt from those forms, rather than corrected entry by entry as in a summary revision.
    3. The current cycle: The nationwide exercise began with Bihar in June 2025 and has proceeded State by State in phases since.

    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?”

  • SC seeks Centre’s response on use of ‘totalisers’ in EVM vote counting

    SC seeks Centre’s response on use of ‘totalisers’ in EVM vote counting

    Why in the News

    The Supreme Court has sought the Centre’s response on the use of “totalisers”, machines that consolidate and count votes from multiple electronic voting machine (EVM) control units at once without revealing booth-wise voting trends, as a “fall-back option”. The order came on a petition arguing that totalisers would protect voters’ privacy by concealing booth-wise voting patterns and shield them from reprisals. The Election Commission (EC) had warned the Court against the move, saying that introducing a new and unregulated mechanism at a time when the integrity of EVMs is itself under frequent public questioning could give rise to fresh allegations and controversy. The tension is between the voter’s privacy at the booth level and the booth-wise, machine-wise trail that the EC calls the backbone of a self-verifying count.

    What is a totaliser?

    1. What it does: A totaliser consolidates and counts votes from multiple EVM control units simultaneously, so the result is declared for the group rather than for each booth.
    2. How it connects: It links a cluster of 14 control units, from 14 polling stations, via a cable.
    3. What it outputs: It provides a consolidated result for each candidate across that group of EVMs, with no booth-wise breakdown.

    Why does the petitioner want totalisers?

    1. Privacy of the individual voter: Booth-wise results reveal how a locality voted, and the petitioner argued that totalisers would safeguard the privacy of individual voters.
    2. Protection from reprisals: Political parties victimise voters at the local level after identifying voting patterns in particular polling booths, and concealing the pattern removes the target.
    3. A fall-back, not a replacement: The Court framed the question to the Centre as one of a “fall-back option”, not a wholesale change in counting.

    On what legal and political grounds does the Election Commission object?

    1. The climate is wrong: The EC told the Court that the functioning and integrity of EVMs are still a subject of frequent public questioning, and that a new and as yet unregulated mechanism would further complicate public confidence in an already sensitive area.
    2. There is no law for it: Neither the Representation of the People Act, 1951 nor the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 nor any allied enactment contains a provision recognising, regulating or governing the use of a totaliser in counting.
    3. Amendments would be needed: Substantive amendments and a revision of the statutory procedure governing the counting of votes would have to be made to include totalisers.
    4. Parties have said no: Three of six national parties and 18 of 29 State parties opposed the idea, and only the Law Commission of India, in its 255th report, suggested their selective use.

    Why does the Election Commission say totalisers would reduce transparency?

    1. Counting is witnessed booth by booth: Polling and counting are conducted in the presence of candidates and their agents.
    2. Form 17C is the reconciliation tool: Candidates and agents use Form 17C to match the vote count at the end of polling and again after counting at every polling station, and those comparisons are used in adjudications before election tribunals and courts.
    3. The trail is the backbone: The one-to-one, booth-wise and EVM-wise correspondence under Form 17C is what the EC calls the backbone of the self-verifying and transparent character of counting, and that transparency gives credence to the outcome.
    4. Parties use the pattern legitimately: Knowledge of booth-level voting lets parties improve outreach in booths where they underperformed and make corrective organisational decisions.
    5. Aggregation hides faults: Totalisers would mask technical malfunction and human error in individual EVMs, since clubbed machines stand concealed within the aggregate figure and cannot be identified or independently verified by any party.
    6. The main worry: The EC’s chief concern is that totalisers would become fodder for further misapprehension about EVMs.

    Challenges to introducing totalisers

    1. Machine-level verification would lose its anchor: The Court-ordered paper trail check works per machine, and an aggregated result has no machine to check against. Eg. Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India (2024) required Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips to be counted for five randomly selected EVMs per Assembly segment.
      The Fix: Keep the machine-wise VVPAT count and Form 17C reconciliation internal to the counting hall, and publish only the aggregated result.
    2. Small clusters still reveal patterns: In sparsely populated segments a cluster of 14 booths can map onto one or two villages, so aggregation does not conceal the locality’s vote. Eg. Hill and tribal constituencies routinely have polling stations serving a few hundred electors each.
      The Fix: Set the cluster size by elector count rather than by a fixed number of machines.
    3. The EC’s own position has moved: The Commission proposed totalisers to the Law Ministry in 2008 and the Law Commission endorsed selective use in 2015, so its present opposition invites the charge of inconsistency. Eg. The 255th report on electoral reforms cited the EC’s proposal when recommending the change.
      The Fix: Publish a reasoned position paper setting out what changed between the 2008 proposal and the present affidavit.

    Conclusion

    The Court has kept the question open and asked the Centre rather than deciding it. The next step is the Centre’s reply, and the source gives no date for it. The marker to watch is whether the Centre is willing to amend the election rules, since without that amendment the EC’s legal objection stands whatever the Court thinks of the privacy claim.

    Back2Basics: Form 17C

    1. What it is: The “Account of Votes Recorded” prepared by the presiding officer of each polling station under the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961.
    2. Part I: Records the identification numbers of the EVMs used, the total electors, the votes recorded in the machine and the number of tendered votes, and a copy goes to each polling agent at the close of poll.
    3. Part II: Records the result of counting for that machine, filled in at the counting centre and signed by the counting supervisor and candidates’ agents.
    4. Why it matters: It is the only document that lets a candidate compare votes polled at a booth with votes counted from that booth.

    [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?”

  • SIR draft rolls see over 13 cr deletions so far, Delhi leads with 33% left out

    Why in the News

    Over 13 crore names have been deleted from draft electoral rolls across 30 States and Union Territories under the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR). Delhi’s draft roll records a cut of 32.8 per cent and Maharashtra’s a cut of 21.1 per cent. The revision began with Bihar in June 2025 and has since moved through phases, the third of which covers 16 States and three Union Territories. The tension is that a deletion at the draft stage reverses the burden of proof, since a person already on the roll must now apply afresh to be restored within a one month window. Almost a third of Delhi’s electors were removed under a single composite head covering absence, shifting and unstated reasons.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision?

    1. It is a house to house re-verification of the roll: Booth level officers distribute and collect enumeration forms from every existing elector rather than processing only new claims.
    2. Non-return of the form leads to deletion: An elector whose enumeration form is not received is left out of the draft roll.
    3. It is run in phases across States: The exercise started in Bihar and has been extended in successive rounds to the rest of the country.
    4. The draft roll is not the final roll: Claims and objections follow publication, and the final roll issues after they are disposed of.

    What do the deletion numbers actually show?

    1. The all-India draft deletion crosses 13 crore: The figure covers 30 States and Union Territories where draft rolls have been published.
    2. The third phase alone accounts for 6.15 crore: Draft rolls have been published in 17 of the units in that phase.
    3. Delhi records the largest proportionate cut: Its electors fell from 1.45 crore before the revision to 97.53 lakh, a drop of 47.56 lakh.
    4. Maharashtra lost about 2.07 crore electors: Its roll fell from 9.78 crore to 7.71 crore.
    5. Three other units cross 20 per cent: Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu at 29.6 per cent, Telangana at 21.7 per cent, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at 20.6 per cent.
    6. Two units are yet to begin: Enumeration is scheduled to start in Nagaland and Tripura over the next two months.

    What reasons are recorded for the deletions?

    1. Delhi’s largest head is absent, shifted or others: It covers 43.32 lakh electors, or 29.86 per cent of the pre-revision roll.
    2. Deceased electors are a small share: They number 2.82 lakh in Delhi, or 1.95 per cent, against 3.56 per cent in Maharashtra.
    3. Duplicate enrolment is smaller still: 1.41 lakh Delhi electors, or 0.98 per cent, were found enrolled at multiple places, against 1.81 per cent in Maharashtra.
    4. Maharashtra’s composite head is 15.78 per cent: Electors permanently shifted, absent or classed as others make up that share of its deletions.
    5. The composite head is doing most of the work: In both States the single largest reason groups movement, absence and unstated causes into one number.

    Why does the official explanation for Delhi not settle the question?

    1. Migration is the stated reason: The stated reason for the highest deletion share is the floating population of the National Capital, where people arrive for work and return to their home States.
    2. The same head also covers electors simply not traced: Booth level officers recorded electors whose enumeration forms were not returned, who were not found in existence, or who did not submit by the cut off date.
    3. Refusal to register sits in the same bucket: An elector unwilling to register for any reason is recorded under the identical head as one who has moved away.
    4. Four different situations produce one figure: Migration, an untraced record, non-submission and refusal cannot be separated from the published number.

    How is a deleted elector supposed to get back on the roll?

    1. The route is Form 6 with a declaration: An aggrieved person files it with the prescribed declaration form and supporting documents.
    2. The Delhi window runs one month: Claims may be filed between 31 August and 30 September.
    3. Disposal runs to late October: Claims and objections are examined and disposed of till 29 October, and the final roll is due on 4 November.
    4. The exclusion lists are published for inspection: Booth wise lists of absent, shifted, dead and duplicate electors are displayed at registration offices and polling stations, and carried on the Chief Electoral Officer’s website.
    5. Multiple enrolment is resolved by retention at one place: An elector found on more than one roll is kept on a single one rather than removed from all.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. The burden of proof shifts onto the elector: A person deleted at the draft stage must file a fresh claim to be restored, so an existing entitlement becomes a new application. Eg. The Bihar revision in 2025 removed about 65 lakh names at the draft stage and left restoration to individual claims.
      The Fix: Require the booth level officer to record and serve an individual written reason on the elector before a name is dropped from the draft roll.
    2. Migrant workers are structurally the most exposed: An elector away from the registered address during enumeration is marked absent whether the move is seasonal or permanent. Eg. Construction and seasonal agricultural workers are typically away from their home constituency for several months of the year.
      The Fix: Extend the enumeration window in constituencies with high recorded out-migration and accept the form by post from any location.
    3. Booth level officers carry an unmanageable load: One officer covers over a thousand electors in a short window while continuing with a full time job elsewhere. Eg. Booth level officers are usually school teachers or anganwadi workers performing the duty alongside their regular work.
      The Fix: Appoint dedicated temporary enumerators for the revision and pay them against verified forms rather than against booths covered.
    4. Documentary requirements exclude the poorest first: Restoration depends on supporting documents that a person without stable residence or records cannot produce. Eg. A large share of the population holds no birth certificate, which document lists for such exercises treat as primary proof of eligibility.
      The Fix: Accept the existing elector photo identity card with a self declaration at the claims stage, and verify after inclusion rather than before it.
    5. The published data cannot be audited: Merging distinct causes into one head means the accuracy of the exercise cannot be tested from what is released. Eg. No State wise account is published of how many deleted electors are subsequently restored through claims.
      The Fix: Publish cause wise and outcome wise figures for every revision, including restorations, alongside the final roll.

    Conclusion

    This is the largest single reduction of India’s electoral roll on record, and a draft roll cannot show whether it was accurate. Whether ineligible entries or eligible electors were removed depends on how many of those left out come back through the claims process. The unresolved position is that the exercise treats absence during a short enumeration window as evidence of ineligibility, in a country where seasonal movement of labour is ordinary. The marker to watch is the gap between draft and final rolls in the two largest affected units, since that difference is the only available measure of how much of the deletion was error.

    Back2Basics: Electoral roll revision under the Representation of the People Act, 1950

    1. Governing provision: Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 provides for the preparation and revision of electoral rolls by the Electoral Registration Officer.
    2. Two forms of revision: A summary revision updates an existing roll through claims and objections, and an intensive revision re-prepares it through house to house enumeration.
    3. Qualifying dates: A person must be 18 years of age on 1 January of the year of revision, with three additional qualifying dates of 1 April, 1 July and 1 October introduced in 2021.
    4. The statutory forms: Form 6 seeks inclusion of a name, Form 7 objects to an inclusion or seeks a deletion, and Form 8 corrects details in an existing entry.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2017] For election to the Lok Sabha, a nomination paper can be filed by (a) Anyone residing in India. (b) A resident of the constituency from which the election is to be contested. (c) Any citizen of India whose name appears in the electoral roll of a constituency. (d) GI any citizen of India. ANSWER: (c)”