Sources in the Election Commission (EC) told Media on Thursday that no Election Commissioner has recorded a dissent on any decision since February 19, 2025. The statement comes at a time when questions are being raised over dissent within the poll body and the way it has handled the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The assertion follows a report published by The Indian Express a week earlier. According to that report, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally recorded their objections 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders linked to the SIR process under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The report said the objections related to several aspects of the exercise, including the centralisation of the ECINet electoral roll database platform, changes to Form 6 and decisions on the deletion of names from electoral rolls.
The matter has drawn further attention after INDIA bloc parties met to discuss the SIR exercise and raised questions over the functioning of the Election Commission.
Poll body sources maintained that SIR is a statutory and established process for revising electoral rolls. They also said that every decision taken by the three-member commission since February 19, 2025, has been unanimous.
According to the EC, the central objective of SIR is to identify dead, duplicate, fake and shifted voters while ensuring that all eligible voters remain on the rolls.
Responding to questions about Form 6, which new voters and those seeking to add their names to the rolls use, EC sources said there has been no change in the form.
Supreme Court proceedings
On the legal scrutiny of SIR, commission sources pointed to the Supreme Court’s proceedings and said the court has never suspended the exercise. They said the court allowed SIR to go ahead, including the voter declaration and mapping process, while putting safeguards in place for voters.
The EC described SIR as a comprehensive process that has been followed for years. It said documents have been sought only from voters born after 1987, while mapping errors are also being identified through software so that fake or duplicate names do not remain on the rolls.
No complaints from 25,000 officials, say sources
The EC also stressed that the process of adding and deleting names is decentralised. It is carried out at the level of Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs), not personally by the Chief Election Commissioner.
Sources said none of the nearly 25,000 EROs and AEROs has complained about the process. They added that some of the concerns around SIR have centred on individual cases, and that Booth Level Officers (BLOs) have been trained to visit voters’ homes at least three times for verification, including where voters are absent or have shifted.
Goa and Bela Estate cases
Explaining the case of 97 Goa voters who were initially left out of the final electoral rolls, sources said their names could not be included because of a technical glitch. Of these, 88 names have since been added, three people were found to be Portuguese citizens and six were abroad at the time. The remaining cases are being verified.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had also raised the issue of 727 voters allegedly being removed from the electoral rolls at Bela Estate. According to EC sources, the process of adding new names is still underway in Delhi. They said that when BLOs visited Bela Estate, no one was present, which raised the question of whom the officials could have approached for signatures or verification.
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EC sources said anyone who has signed and submitted the SIR form to a BLO will have their name confirmed in the draft electoral roll. On the demand to re-include around 11 crore voters in the electoral rolls, commission sources said this would mean restoring names that were removed during the verification process but whose re-verification has not yet been completed.