​Fraught franchise: On a nationwide Special Intensive Revision exercise Politics & News

The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) completion of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, brings the final tally to 7.42 crore electors, a significant drop from the 7.89 crore figure before the exercise began. While the purpose was indeed to clean up the rolls, the lived reality of the exercise, including the manner in which it had to be corrected by the Supreme Court of India, renders the ECI’s ambition to extend the SIR nationwide a matter of concern. The events in Bihar warned of the dangers of adopting a default attitude of suspicion towards the electorate. While the reasons for the deletion of 65 lakh names from the draft rolls, on ostensible grounds such as death, migration, duplication and lack of enumeration, were administratively sound, the process by which they were invoked was opaque. The ECI provided no consolidated list of the excluded and no meaningful prior notice, and attached no reasons to individual cases until the Court insisted on these particulars. Reports indicated that women were deleted in disproportionate numbers, raising questions about the exercise’s accuracy. Even now, the ECI has not disclosed why 3.66 lakh names were removed between the draft and final rolls, the split of Form 6 additions, and a count of alleged foreign nationals, a raison d’être of the exercise but vagueness over which now risks erecting a bogeyman. The ECI also refused to accept widely-held identity documents — most of the poor, the illiterate, women, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes lack the ones it did demand, including birth certificates and caste and domicile papers.

A nationwide SIR conducted under the same requirements used in Bihar would likely replicate the same risks of exclusion. Electoral management research, including studies by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, points to three practices that enhance inclusion in roll revision: door-to-door verification by enumerators to supplement self-reporting; the use of widely held identity documents, such as Aadhaar and ration cards in India, to minimise barriers for citizens without birth or caste certificates; and advance publication of reasons for proposed deletions combined with an accessible appeals process. India’s prior revisions, particularly in the early 2000s, depended more extensively on local booth-level officers and physical checks, which helped to identify errors without shifting the burden entirely onto the electors. A national SIR could also draw on digital tools to consolidate and publish exclusion data while ensuring physical notice at the constituency level, balancing transparency with privacy. Such measures would help the ECI ensure that no legitimate voter is excluded, especially at a time when Karnataka’s Aland incident has raised sharp doubts on its technical competency.