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The press note by the Election Commission of India, following the meeting of chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar and election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, along with subsequent instructions to state chief election officers (CEOs) on various issue, exposes serious illegalities and irregularities in its conduct. It is a damaging institutional admission that Indians who should not have been excluded were excluded, and the safeguards used to exclude them were either unlawful, defective or arbitrarily applied. 

More than being a belated clean-up operation which is now being presented as administrative responsiveness and rectification, this is evasion of accountability by Gyanesh for stripping eligible Indians of franchise. 

New re-enrolment drives and doorstep form collection

By ordering every CEO, DEO and ERO to run a special enrolment drive for voters “left out during SIR or thereafter,” the ECI has conceded that exclusion of voters was not a mistake but a widespread design outcome of the process contrived by Gyanesh. In the least, it is an admission that the ECI under Gyanesh illegally disenfranchised citizens and needs to be held accountable for its actions. 

By telling officials to compare pre-SIR and post-SIR rolls, identify deleted voters, visit their homes and obtain Form 6 applications, the ECI now effectively admits that its deletion process did not distinguish between dead, duplicate or migrated voters and legitimate electors. If the process was sound, why must officials hunt for deleted voters, revisit homes, compare old and new rolls, and re-enrol citizens through a form designed for new applicants? They are Gyanesh’s confession that the machinery he ran was meant to strip eligible Indians of their vote.

A voter should not have to be rediscovered by the state after the state has wrongly erased her. Even then, the burden of re-enrolment is being pushed on to the voter when it should be the responsibility of the ECI to automatically include them. The process continues to remain exclusionary in its intent even now.

Also read: Day 2 of Anti-SIR Protest: Yogendra Yadav, Neha Bora Detained Amid Chants of ‘Gyanesh Kumar Murdabad’

The right to vote cannot depend on whether a citizen survives a software flag, a paperwork hurdle, a discretionary hearing, or a subsequent rescue drive. The Constitution does not license the CEC to first disenfranchise citizens and then congratulate itself for offering them a route back by pushing the burden of re-enrolment on to those voters.

Misuse of Form 6 for adding existing voters

Form 6 is the statutory application for new registration, not a device to launder wrongful deletion of genuine voters. Making already eligible, previously enrolled voters apply afresh shifts the burden from the Election Commission, which removed them, to citizens, who must now prove their way back onto the roll. Instructions that regular Form 6 will now apply outside SIR acknowledges that past procedures initiated by Gyanesh violated administrative norms and statutory frameworks. Moreover, as noted by former CEC S.Y. Qureshi, Form 6 is legally meant only for first-time or new voters, and forces the illegally disenfranchised voters to commit a crime as they would misrepresent themselves as new........

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