7 min readSep 24, 2026 01:41 PM IST First published on: Sep 24, 2026 at 01:41 PM ISTThe explosive investigative report by The Indian Express revealing that two Election Commissioners formally recorded written objections at least 14 times over 10 months against decisions taken by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, red-flagging unilateral and “unauthorised” changes to new voter registration forms, and objecting to mass voter deletions during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, has taken the lid off an electoral upheaval that is insidiously reshaping the contours of Indian democracy. What was conceived as a routine technical cleanup of electoral rolls has mushroomed into a bureaucratic dragnet of unprecedented scale, raising fundamental questions about franchise, citizenship, and administrative overreach.The news about Delhi’s voter roll would be farcical if it weren’t so grave in its implications: More than half (54.6 per cent) of the capital’s existing voters have either been struck off the voter roll or been served notices by the Election Commission of India (ECI) asking them to prove that they are genuine. Out of Delhi’s 1.45 crore registered voters, over 80 lakh are currently under the ECI scanner. Approximately 47.5 lakh voters have been marked for deletion under the categories of Absent, Shifted, Dead, or Duplicate. A further 33.13 lakh have been flagged for operational and technical errors, including 19.33 lakh marked for “logical discrepancies” and 13.80 lakh left unmapped against the 2002 electoral rolls. By mid-September, over 31.6 lakh notices had been generated.AdvertisementThis massive contraction is far from limited to Delhi. Across 17 of the 19 states and union territories undergoing the third phase of the SIR, electoral rolls are reportedly shrinking by over 15 per cent. National estimates suggest that overall deletions could wipe out 12 to 13 crore voters nationwide, with Maharashtra alone expected to lose up to 2 crore voters, Delhi shrinking by 35.89 per cent, and Chandigarh by 31.84 per cent. Instead of India’s voters choosing the government, it seems the government, acting through the ECI, will choose the voters.Curiously, this purge comes on the heels of pre-existing, unexplained deletions. Between January 2025 and June 2026, prior to the formal launch of the SIR, 1.1 million Delhi voters were inexplicably dropped from the rolls. This anomaly sharply diverges from standard demographic trends. Between the 2020 Assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha elections, approximately 4,00,000 voters were added; a similar number joined between the 2024 general election and the 2025 state polls. In a country where the adult population has expanded from 99 crore in 2024 to an estimated 103 crore today, logic dictates that electoral rolls should expand in tandem. Instead, analysts like Yogendra Yadav project that the national electorate could contract to 88 crore, effectively disenfranchising up to 15 crore citizens.Also Read | I have voted for three decades. Why is my SIR incomplete?The mindless severity of the exercise was brought into sharp relief when the notice list unexpectedly caught prominent public figures from across the official spectrum. Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and her predecessor were flagged; ruling the state apparently confers no immunity. Foreign Minister S Jaishankar is speaking for India at the UN with an EC-created cloud over his eligibility to do so. The list embraces constitutional dignitaries and institutional heads, including an Election Commissioner, a CBI Director, and a distinguished list of “formers”: A Vice President, Chief Justice, Army Chief, and SEBI Chairman. The ECI claims this proves the process is non-discriminatory!AdvertisementYet, this defence highlights the core inequity of the process. While ministers, judges, and high-ranking officials possess the institutional access and resources to rectify technical glitches seamlessly, the average citizen is plunged into administrative chaos. Furthermore, many of these “discrepancies” originate not from citizen error, but from flawed internal ECI databases, such as coding errors where a father’s recorded age of 45 was converted to zero, or a clerk misspelled a name, creating an artificial “logical discrepancy.” Yesterday’s Express report from Goa highlights how the ECI’s software has eliminated large numbers of legitimate voters and deprived them of essential benefits, from dialysis to transplants, for which only voters are eligible. (‘8 emails in 7 days, but valid Goa voters still left out: EC’s flawed system,’ IE, September 23) The real-world fallout of this process reveals staggeringly inhumane anomalies. In Delhi, 24 out of 70 assembly constituencies now count fewer registered electors than the actual number of voters who cast ballots in the 2025 assembly elections. In polling booth 33 of the Chandni Chowk constituency, 908 out of 909 voters were summarily marked for deletion.you may likeAlready seriously troubling was the experience in West Bengal, where 27 lakh voters were flagged for tribunal review due to alleged “logical discrepancies”. The Right to Information (RTI) disclosures revealed that out of 82,000 cases adjudicated, a staggering 91 per cent were found to have been wrongly deleted and had to be restored. If nine out of 10 deletions under the banner of “logical discrepancies” are demonstrably false, the foundational credibility of the ECI’s algorithms stands deeply compromised. While the Supreme Court has upheld the legality of the SIR exercise, former Chief Election Commissioners Ashok Lavasa and S Y Quraishi have openly questioned its fairness. Quraishi has critiqued the decision to treat the 2002 electoral roll as an unassailable baseline for voter mapping, pointing out that even his own father’s name was misspelt in the 2002 data. Equally alarming is the delegation of quasi-judicial power to Booth Level Officers (predominantly government school teachers) who are effectively tasked with verifying citizenship credentials for long-standing voters. Giving them and unreliable software the authority to decide whether citizens remain entitled to vote risks converting routine documentation checks into arbitrary purges.Finally, the timing of these revisions raises persistent concerns. In Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, the compressed execution of the SIR was scheduled right before major elections. The ECI has yet to provide a convincing rationale for forcing millions of voters into an administrative straitjacket under tight statutory deadlines just weeks before they are due to exercise their franchise, without enough time to appeal and rectify an injustice. Disenfranchising genuine citizens in haste is worse than allowing 10 times as many dead voters to remain on the rolls.The right to vote is the bedrock upon which Indian democracy rests. When electoral rolls contract while populations grow, when nine out of 10 technical deletions prove erroneous upon review, and when millions of valid voters face disenfranchisement for no fault of their own, the integrity of our democracy itself is imperilled. Cleaning the voter rolls is a legitimate administrative objective; excluding legitimate citizens in the process is an institutional failure Indian democracy can ill afford. SIR must be rethought or abandoned.The writer is a fourth-term Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram