​Augean mess: on the SIR and the genuine voter Politics & News

With the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process in its claims and corrections phase, it is prudent to ask, yet again, whether the entire process to “clean the electoral rolls” has become a dragnet affecting genuine electors across 12 States. On Monday, the Supreme Court of India issued fresh directions to the ECI to “ease the strain and stress” of millions of electors facing verification notices in West Bengal. Complaints of genuine electors having to run from pillar to post after being sent notices — many are flawed due to errors in the 2002 list used by the ECI for “mapping” or due to glitches in ad hoc software — have forced petitioners to raise questions. As seen during the SIR in Bihar, the Court has again had to issue guidelines to ease the process. In the case of Bihar, the Court’s order for Aadhaar to be used as the twelfth identity document provided succour to millions, yet the final electorate numbers showed an egregious anomaly — the deletion of more women electors than men, suggesting that the process was flawed to begin with. This was confirmed in The Hindu’s analyses of the deleted electors’ lists in Bihar, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal which had shown anomalies that merited further investigation but did not get the ECI’s response.

In Tamil Nadu, the deletion process has been so aggressive in many booths that the sum of electors who voted in the 2024 general election and names deleted during the SIR reportedly exceeds the total number of electors originally on the rolls. This suggests that genuine electors who voted in 2024 have also been deleted. Furthermore, the process of deduplicating names has, in many cases, resulted in the deletion of electors’ names entirely. While the claims and corrections phase is witnessing lakhs of electors trying to re-enter the rolls, the ECI’s insistence on their registering as fresh electors (using Form 6) is illogical and prevents an audit of how many genuine electors were wrongly removed in the first place. Then there is the incomprehensible mismatch in Uttar Pradesh. The State Election Commission, while preparing rolls for rural body polls, found that its count of the rural electorate alone exceeds the ECI’s count for the entire State in the draft rolls. By not deciding on the constitutionality of this aggressive self-enumeration early on, the Court is now left managing the fallout of a process that has turned the simple act of maintaining an electoral list into one posing a threat to universal adult franchise. The question is no longer just about “cleaning the rolls” but also on whether genuine voters are being scrubbed off.