The Election Commission has issued a directive asking state poll panels to re-evaluate the removal of eligible voters from voter lists following concerns about the functioning of the commission and alleged irregularities.
The Election Commission (EC) has directed poll panels in states where the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has been completed to conduct an exercise for reinstating through Form 6 eligible voters who may have been wrongly removed from the voter lists. This directive comes amid political parties, activists, and civil society groups raising concerns about the EC's handling of the SIR and demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in the conduct of elections.
Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi stated that Form 6 cannot be filled by deleted voters as it is only for new voters. He said that all those who have been forced to fill it have committed a criminal offense carrying one year imprisonment and that EC officials who forced them are abetters to crime.
The EC announced that booth-level officers will compare the electoral roll prepared after the revision of voter lists to those before the exercise and identify persons whose names ‘were there in the pre-SIR roll but who are not included’ in the new rolls. The EC also directed the booth-level officers to undertake house-to-house surveys of voters identified during the process, ascertain their current status, and facilitate their enrolment through Form 6 wherever the person is found to be eligible.
The EC stated that booth-level officers may cover at least 20 to 25 voters in a week ‘so as to complete this exercise within a period of about one month’. The officers will share the list of new enrolments with the booth-level agents of political parties, and the electoral registration officer will act ‘as deemed fit’ in these cases. At the end of the exercise, booth-wise lists would be shared by the electoral registration officer with the representatives of political parties, giving them a further opportunity for enrolment of any voters who have been left out.
The Opposition has stated that 13.8 crore voters had been removed from the voter lists of 31 states and Union Territories so far. This accounts for 14.6% of India’s 94.7 crore voters before the exercise began in 2025.
On September 26, the Election Commission had said that the old version of Form 6 will be used in periods when the SIR is not underway. It said that the declaration attached to Form 6 for the voter roll revision exercise had been upheld by the Supreme Court. This came three days after The Indian Express reported on September 23 that two of the Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.
Source:
Scroll.in
