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In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until observed. In contemporary Bengal, that paradox has acquired a bureaucratic form. The voter, too, can exist in a state of superposition, simultaneously verified and deleted, present and absent, until the system decides otherwise.

I know this not as metaphor, but as experience.

On March 30, 2026, I, along with lakhs of voters in West Bengal, discovered that my name no longer appeared on the electoral roll. When I checked the Election Commission of India’s website on March 31, my status was ‘deleted’. As of April 14, the website says that I am ‘excluded’. In many cases like mine, this followed compliance with the procedures laid out under the special intensive revision (SIR) exercise. I had filed the online enumeration form tracing lineage, submitted relevant documents, and duly initiated a request for address change. The ECI website still says that my field verification was satisfactorily completed on February 18, and on February 26, the status changed to ‘accepted’. Thus the field verification conducted in mid-February confirmed my presence at a given address, only for that same voter – me – to be marked ‘deleted’ by the end of March. ‘Logical discrepancies’ clearly come in many forms. 

This is not a clerical error in the ordinary sense. It is not the kind of mistake that can be dismissed with a shrug and a promise of correction. What is at stake is something far more fundamental: the quiet transformation of citizenship into a probabilistic condition. To be a voter is to be counted. It is to occupy a place in the ledger of the state, to be legible to the machinery that translates presence into participation. When that legibility breaks down, what remains is not merely inconvenience. It is a form of suspension. As of April 13, almost 34 lakh appeals pending at the tribunal in West Bengal occupy that liminal space – waiting for natural justice, waiting for resolution. 

The language of administration is often reassuring in its precision. There are processes, verifications, enumerations. There are officers who visit homes, databases that store records, systems that update in real time. The promise is one of rationality and control: a large and complex democracy rendered manageable through procedure. But scale has its own politics. The ECI ordered the SIR in Bengal on October 27, 2025. The revised electoral roll was published on February 28, 2026. When exercises of this magnitude are conducted under pressure in compressed timelines, the system does not merely strain. It begins to produce anomalies. And these anomalies are not distributed evenly. Reports from across regions suggest that exclusions are not isolated incidents but patterns. What looks like a technical glitch from a distance begins to resemble something else when viewed up close: a systemic vulnerability that attaches itself to those least equipped to contest it. 

And in all of this lies the unavoidable question of privilege. If these processes can falter for those like me with documentation, institutional affiliation, education, technical prowess and the familiarity required to navigate them, then the implications for those without such privilege are harder to ignore. The figures suggest that more than 90 lakh names have been removed under SIR. Many of them, of course, are genuine deletions of absentee, shifted or dead voters. However, 34 lakh pending appeals as on April 14 suggest that at this scale, the issue is no longer one of isolated discrepancy. It is not about who is excluded, but who is most easily made to disappear.

Exercises of this scale are, by their nature, demanding. They require time not only to gather information, but also to reconcile it, to verify it, and to ensure that correction does not become inadvertent exclusion. Yet the present moment carries the sense of a process conducted in haste, where the pressure to complete may have outpaced the capacity to carefully adjudicate. This pressure does not operate only at the level of data. It is borne by the very officials tasked with executing it. Reports have emerged of BLOs working under extreme timelines and scrutiny, in some cases with tragic consequences, including instances of death by suicide.

To follow the process itself requires a certain familiarity: tracking status updates online, interpreting shifting classifications, uploading documents in prescribed formats, and responding within narrow windows of time. Even for those equipped to do so, the infrastructure has not always cooperated. The Election Commission’s website, now central to verification and correction, has been intermittently inaccessible (many citizens have reported that captchas do not work), its interface opaque (scanned PDFs are not searchable), its categories not always intuitive.

To follow the process itself requires a certain familiarity: tracking status updates online, interpreting shifting classifications, uploading documents in prescribed formats, and responding within narrow windows of time. Even for those equipped to do so, the infrastructure has not always cooperated. The Election Commission’s website, now central to verification and correction, has been intermittently inaccessible (many citizens have reported that captchas do not work), its interface opaque (scanned PDFs are not searchable), its categories not always intuitive.

These may appear, individually, as minor frictions within a large administrative exercise. But taken together, they suggest something more consequential. When inclusion depends so heavily on procedural continuity and when that continuity is so easily disrupted, the question is no longer simply who is on the roll, but how recognition itself is being determined, and with what degree of reliability. Democracy, at its most basic, rests on the principle of inclusion. It assumes that the governed are also the governing and that the act of voting is the minimal expression of this relationship. When inclusion becomes uncertain, when participation is subject to administrative fluctuation, the very ground of that relationship shifts.

One could argue that no system is perfect, that errors are inevitable in a democracy of this scale. That is true. But the measure of a system is not whether it produces errors. It is how it responds to them. At the moment, the burden seems to fall disproportionately on the voter. You must prove that you exist, even after the system has already seen you. You must reconcile the contradiction between verification and deletion, between presence and absence. You must, in effect, collapse your own wave function by insisting on a single, stable identity in a system that has rendered you multiple.

The Supreme Court has said that tribunals must conduct proceedings in accordance with the principles of natural justice: that is, they must issue a hearing notice, give the accused an opportunity to appear before the tribunal, and deliver a reasoned order. Symbolically, it is important. However, in terms of implementation, the math, as they say, is not ‘mathing’. If hearings are conducted following natural justice, then consider this: 19 judges, each giving a maximum of 8 hours per day, can together provide 19 × 8 = 152 hours per day, which is 152 × 60 = 9120 minutes. Even if only five minutes are spent per voter, only 1,824 cases can be heard in a day. That means, even if the tribunal starts today, in the next seven days it can hear at most 12,768 cases. In other words, out of the total 3,400,000 excluded voters, only about 0.3% can possibly be heard. And this is a very optimistic estimate. What happens to the other 99.7%? As their appeals lie pending, their citizenship comes under a cloud. 

Until the system resolves itself, 34 lakh people in West Bengal are rendered Schrödinger’s Voter by the state: present in reality, absent in democracy.

Dr Nandita Roy is a faculty member at IIM Calcutta. She teaches communication and works on narratives at the intersection of gender, media, and technology.

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