• An investigative report revealed that two Election Commissioners raised written objections at least 14 times in 10 months over decisions of CEC Gyanesh Kumar, including changes to voter registration forms and mass voter deletions during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
• The issue highlights internal differences within the ECI and raises concerns over electoral rolls, voting rights, citizenship verification and administrative accountability.

• The SIR is meant to be a technical exercise aimed at cleaning up India’s electoral rolls by identifying and removing duplicate, deceased, shifted, or absent voters, along with correcting genuine data errors.
• In Delhi alone, more than half, or 54.6%, of the existing voter list has either been struck off the rolls or served notices demanding proof of genuineness.
• Out of Delhi’s total registered voters, over 80 lakh voters currently remain under the ECI’s scanner.
• Around 47.5 lakh voters have been marked for deletion under categories such as Absent, Shifted, Dead, or Duplicate.
• A further 33.13 lakh voters have been flagged for technical and operational errors, including 19.33 lakh cases of so-called “logical discrepancies.”
• By mid-September, over 31.6 lakh notices had already been issued to voters in the capital.
• This pattern is not confined to Delhi alone — across 17 of the 19 states and Union Territories currently undergoing the third phase of SIR, electoral rolls are shrinking by more than 15%.
• National-level projections suggest these deletions could ultimately wipe out 12 to 13 crore voters across the country.
• Maharashtra alone is expected to lose nearly 2 crore voters, while Delhi and Chandigarh could shrink by over 30% each.
• Such a drastic contraction raises the uncomfortable possibility that, instead of citizens choosing their government through free and fair elections, the administrative machinery itself may end up shaping who gets to vote.

• The contraction in voter numbers runs directly against India’s demographic reality.
• Even before the SIR was formally launched, between January 2025 and June 2026, around 1.1 million voters in Delhi were mysteriously dropped from the electoral rolls.
• This trend does not match earlier patterns, where voter additions consistently outpaced deletions between successive elections.
• India’s population has grown from 99 crore in 2024 to an estimated 103 crore today, meaning electoral rolls should be expanding rather than shrinking.
• Several analysts have projected the national electorate could contract to as low as 88 crore, effectively risking the disenfranchisement of nearly 15 crore citizens.
• The deletion list unexpectedly included several high-profile public figures — sitting and former Chief Ministers, Union Ministers, an Election Commissioner, and other senior constitutional dignitaries.
• While the ECI has cited this as evidence that the process treats everyone equally, critics argue it actually exposes the core inequity of the system.
• Powerful individuals possess the resources and institutional access to correct such errors quickly, while an ordinary citizen is often left struggling through confusing bureaucratic procedures.
• Many of these so-called discrepancies have been traced back to flaws within the ECI’s own internal databases — coding errors that distorted recorded ages, or simple clerical misspellings wrongly treated as identity mismatches.
• In Goa, similar software errors reportedly deprived genuine voters of essential welfare benefits, including access to dialysis and organ transplant services linked to voter status.
• In certain Delhi constituencies, the number of currently registered voters is now lower than the number of people who actually voted in the 2025 assembly elections.

• Around 27 lakh voters were flagged for tribunal review under the category of “logical discrepancies.”
• RTI disclosures revealed that out of 82,000 cases formally adjudicated, a staggering 91% were found to have been wrongly deleted and subsequently had to be restored.
• This means nine out of every ten deletions made under this category were factually incorrect.

• Although the Supreme Court has upheld the legality of conducting the SIR, several former election commissioners have openly questioned its fairness in practice.
• Concerns have been raised over the ECI’s decision to treat the 2002 electoral roll as an unquestionable baseline for verifying long-standing voters — even that historical dataset is known to contain clerical errors.
• Perhaps more concerning is the delegation of quasi-judicial authority to Booth Level Officers, effectively tasked with determining citizenship eligibility of voters who may have been registered for decades.
• Handing such significant, largely unchecked power to relatively junior functionaries risks turning a routine documentation exercise into an arbitrary and unaccountable process of exclusion.

• In states such as Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, the exercise was carried out in a heavily compressed timeframe just ahead of major elections.
• The ECI has so far failed to offer a convincing justification for pushing millions of voters through such an intensive verification process under extremely tight deadlines.
• This has left many citizens with little to no time to appeal wrongful deletions.

• Constitutional standpoint: the right to vote is a statutory right under the Representation of the People Act; excluding genuine citizens without safeguards threatens universal adult suffrage.
• Administrative standpoint: the volume of technical/clerical errors within the ECI’s own systems points to a gap in institutional capacity and data governance, not large-scale voter fraud.
• Federal and political standpoint: uneven implementation across states just before elections raises questions about whether timing could unintentionally influence outcomes.
• Ethical governance standpoint: internal objections raised by sitting Election Commissioners apparently not acted upon point to a breakdown in collective, collegial decision-making within the ECI.
• Technological standpoint: over-reliance on automated systems for sensitive administrative decisions affecting fundamental democratic rights, without adequate testing or audit, carries real risk.

• Strikes at the credibility of India’s electoral democracy.
• The contradiction between growing population and shrinking electorate points to deeper systemic issues.
• High-profile constitutional figures ending up on the deletion list unintentionally helped surface a problem that might otherwise have stayed hidden.
• The West Bengal 91% error rate moves the debate from allegation to documented fact.

Way Forward

The right to vote is the foundation of democracy, making accurate and inclusive electoral rolls essential. While SIR aims to remove errors and ineligible entries, concerns over wrongful deletions, shrinking voter rolls and implementation raise questions about fairness and reliability. The process should be carefully reviewed, made more transparent, and supported by effective grievance-redressal mechanisms.