THE HINDU EDITORIAL

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Presumed ineligible: On the Election Commission of India’s SIR process

The Election Commission of India must end its method of deleting first and verifying later

Not one eligible elector should be left out of the electoral rolls. This statement appears in nearly every document released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) as part of the ongoing SIR process, and the Supreme Court of India, which is hearing petitions challenging the SIR, has also used this refrain. Yet, according to an ECI counter-affidavit filed in the Court, by early September 2026, out of more than 38 lakh appeals submitted to SIR appellate tribunals in West Bengal, just over 1,22,000 appeals were disposed of (a disposal rate of just 3.2%) and 1,13,943 electors were added back to the rolls (an inclusion rate of nearly 93%). This suggests that the claims/corrections phase in the West Bengal SIR — during which judicial officers deployed for verification deemed 27 lakh of the 60 lakh electors flagged for “logical discrepancies” to be ineligible — was deeply flawed. More than 22 lakh of those found ineligible have since appealed, and ECI data show that more than nine in 10 cases decided by the tribunals have ended with the electors back on the rolls. If these “inclusion” and “disposal” rates hold, the majority of the 27 lakh electors should not have been ineligible in the first place and are now struggling to get back on the rolls — an indication that massive disenfranchisement preceded the West Bengal Assembly polls. With municipal elections in the State approaching, the ECI must speed up the appellate process and restore eligible electors to the rolls.

 

In Phase 3 of the SIR, The Hindu’s analysis found that in 24 out of Delhi’s 70 constituencies, the draft roll now records fewer electors than those who voted in the February 2025 Assembly election. Such large-scale deletion cannot hold unless there was a major migration process in the capital region or large numbers of voters were never ordinarily resident in Delhi. A more plausible answer is that the enumeration itself has struck off actual voters. The process puts the onus of proving eligibility on the elector, and the ECI’s dropping of enumeration forms at homes has not translated into full enumeration. Requiring electors to link themselves to rolls drawn in the early 2000s then manufactures “discrepancies” even when documents are valid. In Delhi, this “mapping” has put 13.79 lakh electors under notice with a further 19.33 lakh flagged for “logical discrepancies” on undefined grounds. While hearing the Bihar SIR petitions, the Court had intervened sharply to stop eligible voters from being struck off. Its permissiveness in the year since, towards an insouciant ECI has allowed disenfranchisement on a scale that will remain a black mark on the jurisprudence of universal adult franchise in India. As the Court hears petitions on Delhi and West Bengal, it must compel the ECI to reverse course.