INDIA ; Thirteen Crore Names and a Democracy in Question

The Vanishing Voters: India’s Biggest Electoral Crisis

PAHARI BARUAH

There is a document that most citizens never think about until the moment they need it most. It does not make headlines in ordinary times. It does not inspire speeches or street processions. It is simply a list of names. But that list is, in a very real sense, the first gate of democracy. Before a person can vote, that person must first appear on it. Remove the name and the vote disappears, quietly, without drama, often without the voter ever knowing it happened. This is why the story of India’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, now at the centre of one of the most serious controversies in the country’s recent democratic history, matters to every Indian citizen regardless of which party they support or which leader they admire.

The controversy did not begin on the streets. It began inside the Election Commission of India itself.

The Indian Express, in an investigation published in September 2026, revealed that two of the three Election Commissioners sitting inside India’s highest electoral authority had formally recorded their objections on at least 14 separate occasions over a period of 10 months.

The two commissioners were Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. The subject of their repeated concern was the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, known by its acronym SIR, which began in Bihar in June 2025 and has since been extended to 30 states and Union Territories across the country. According to the investigation, the names of more than 13 crore voters had been left out of draft electoral rolls during this exercise.

Thirteen crore is not a number that yields easily to the imagination. It is larger than the entire population of most countries on earth. It is more than three times the population of Canada. And while the Election Commission has been careful to distinguish between draft exclusions and final deletions, arguing that those left off draft rolls could still appeal for restoration, the scale of the exercise alone carries a weight that demands honest examination.

Election Commission of India under Scrutiny: SIR, Electoral Rolls and Questions over Decision Making

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The Election Commission, for its part, has firmly rejected the suggestion that anything went wrong. In its response to the Indian Express investigation, the Commission said that differing views are a normal part of institutional deliberation. It said that all decisions taken during the relevant period were unanimous. It did not dispute that the 14 written objections existed.

That last detail matters. Two commissioners formally recorded their concerns 14 times. The Commission says the decisions were still unanimous. Understanding how both things can be true at once requires a brief visit to the constitutional architecture that governs this institution.

The Election Commission of India is not a government department. It is a constitutional body created by Article 324 of the Constitution, which gives it superintendence, direction and control over the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections. Since 1993 it has been a three member body, consisting of the Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners. The Chief Election Commissioner is the Chairman of this collective body. He is not its sole authority.

This point was settled by the Supreme Court itself in 1995, in a landmark case involving the then Chief Election Commissioner T.N. Seshan, who was one of the most formidable and independent occupants of that office in the Commission’s history. When Seshan challenged the expansion of the Commission into a multi member body, the Supreme Court held that the constitutional responsibility for elections belongs to the Election Commission as an institution and not to the Chief Election Commissioner alone. The CEC’s position as Chairman, the Court made clear, did not give him the power to override the other Commissioners.

The present controversy takes on its sharpest edge precisely here. The Chief Election Commissioner today is Gyanesh Kumar. And the question that has now entered not only public debate but the Supreme Court of India itself is whether, during the SIR exercise, decisions were made in ways that the other two commissioners were not fully part of.

The concerns recorded by Sandhu and Joshi were not minor procedural quibbles. They went to the foundation of how the electoral roll exercise was being conducted.

[All India Students’ Association ( AISA) National President Ms. Neha Bora reached out from a police bus as she is detained along other activists during a protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) row, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, on September 25, 2026; photo credit : PTI]

One of the most concrete issues involved Form 6, the statutory form that a first time voter uses to apply for registration. According to the Indian Express investigation, the form was changed in July 2026 on the Commission’s digital platform, ECINet, to include a new question asking whether the applicant or a parent or grandparent appeared in the electoral roll during the previous SIR exercise. Joshi objected in May 2026, before the change was made, on the ground that altering a statutory form required a corresponding amendment to the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. Sandhu recorded his concurrence with that objection. The investigation found that the change was made regardless.

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This is not a technical argument about form design. It is a question about whether the procedure for entering the electoral system for the very first time was made harder in ways that the law does not permit. A first generation voter whose parents never registered, or whose family history in the system is incomplete, would face a question at the very beginning of the registration process that other citizens would not face. The law, as it stood, did not require such a question. The rules, as they stood, did not authorise it without amendment.

The second major concern involved the ECINet platform itself. The Commission has been building this system as the technology backbone of its operations. Centralising the management of voter data on a single platform can make administration more efficient. But Sandhu and Joshi reportedly raised concerns about what this centralisation meant in practice for Electoral Registration Officers, the ground level officials who have statutory duties in each constituency. Joshi reportedly asked for an audit to establish who held access credentials to the software and who could make changes to voter records. That request, according to the investigation, was not granted.

The significance of this concern was illustrated most plainly in Goa. The investigation reported that local election officials identified 97 voters as eligible for inclusion in the final electoral roll. But the software did not give the Electoral Registration Officers the option they needed to restore those names. The requests to make that option available were not addressed before the final roll was published. Those 97 voters lost their place on the roll, not because a human officer made a decision against them, but because the software did not provide the pathway to include them.

In a democracy, software that limits what a constitutional officer can do is not merely a technical problem. It is a problem of authority and accountability. The constitutional power to maintain electoral rolls rests with the Election Commission and its officers. If the design of a digital system effectively overrides the judgment of a statutory officer, then the question of who is actually making electoral decisions becomes genuinely difficult to answer.

Then there is West Bengal, where the numbers become stranger still.

The Election Commission informed the Supreme Court that more than 38 lakh appeals were pending in connection with the SIR process in West Bengal. Of these, approximately 22 lakh were filed by voters seeking to have their names restored. But approximately 16 lakh appeals sought the deletion of names of voters who had been included. Sandhu reportedly questioned who had authorised those 16 lakh deletion appeals and who had actually filed them, since neither he, nor Joshi, nor the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal, had been informed about the process through which those appeals were initiated.

The Election Commission has not yet provided a public answer to that specific question.

To be clear, none of this constitutes a legal finding. An investigative report, however thoroughly documented, is not a court judgment. A petition filed in the Supreme Court is an allegation, not a verdict. The Election Commission is entitled to the presumption that it acted within the law until a court determines otherwise. That is how the rule of law works, and it works that way for constitutional institutions as much as for individual citizens.

What is different in this case is that the concerns have come not from outside critics but from inside the institution. When two of three members of a constitutional body record formal objections, 14 times over 10 months, the questions they raise carry a weight that political allegations alone cannot match. And when a Supreme Court petition now asks for the criminal prosecution of the Chief Election Commissioner and a Special Investigation Team inquiry into the deletion of 13 crore voter names, the matter has moved well beyond the terrain of ordinary political controversy.

The Supreme Court has already been examining aspects of the SIR process. It directed that voter disputes in West Bengal be processed through judicial officers. It ordered the Election Commission to publish the names of deleted voters in Bihar with reasons for their removal. The Commission complied, and published those names within 56 hours. That responsiveness to judicial direction is important. It means the institution is operating under scrutiny and is capable of responding to it.

The deeper question raised by this controversy is about institutional design. The three member Election Commission exists because the drafters of India’s Constitution understood that power over elections should not rest in one pair of hands. The Supreme Court in the Seshan case reinforced this by making clear that collective institutional responsibility is not a formality. It is the constitutional safeguard itself.

The debate around the SIR will continue through courts, through Parliament, where opposition parties have announced plans to move a motion for the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner, and through the Bihar assembly elections for which the revised rolls will be used. Each of these processes will produce its own findings in its own time.

But elections in India do not begin on polling day. They begin months and sometimes years earlier, in the quiet work of updating voter lists, registering first time voters, removing names where the law requires it and protecting names where the law requires that too. The ordinary citizen who has never heard of the SIR, who does not follow constitutional law, who simply expects to walk to a polling booth and cast a vote, depends entirely on the integrity of that quiet process.

The controversy around the Election Commission is therefore not a story about political parties or their fortunes. It is a story about whether the institution that prepares the ground for every vote in the world’s most populous democracy is functioning as the Constitution intended. That is a question every citizen has a right to ask and every citizen has a reason to care about.

The names on a voter list are not entries in a database. They are the signatures of a democracy.

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