Election Commission and Voters: Trust must run both ways

Earlier this month, I searched for my name in the SIR records. It was not there. Instead, I found it on the ASDD list: absent, shifted, dead or duplicate.

I am none of those things. I live at the same permanent address. I have a passport issued at that address. Yet I am now required to file Form 6 and ask to be entered again as a voter.

This is not a complaint about one name in one constituency. Across India, people are discovering that they have become a problem for the electoral system they were once part of. They must find old records, locate parents’ names in rolls prepared decades ago, obtain documents, visit offices and wait for decisions. This begs the question, once the state machinery has put a person on the roll, why does that person have to prove his existence all over again?

A roll is not a waiting room.

The Representation of the People Act, 1950 is clear about where responsibility lies. Section 13B makes the Electoral Registration Officer responsible for preparing and revising the roll. Section 22 permits correction or deletion only after proper verification. Where deletion is proposed on grounds of residence or eligibility, the voter must receive a reasonable opportunity to be heard. Section 23 deals with inclusion and Section 24 with appeals.

This is a local system by design. An identifiable officer decides the case of an identifiable voter and can be called to account for it.

SIR changes the practical burden. The Commission can argue that the voter technically retains the remedies, but a person omitted from the draft has to find documents, make claims and persuade officials to restore what was already recognised. Form 6 is an application for inclusion. It is not the same as asking for more verification while keeping an existing voter safely on the roll.

The Supreme Court upheld Bihar’s SIR process. Subsequent SIRs, however, changed materially. Documents were deferred at enumeration; voters were matched to older rolls and family records; software flags increasingly determined who faced scrutiny. For someone who was a child in 2002, or whose parents are dead, estranged or displaced, that turns the past into an obstacle course. Is it fair that the Commission’s difficulty in locating records should become the citizen’s burden to solve?

When the software decides
The law names EROs and assistant EROs. It does not name an IT system as the custodian of the roll.

Yet the system increasingly appears to decide what an ERO can do. The Indian Express reported that 97 eligible voters in Goa stayed excluded because corrections could not be enabled on the software despite repeated requests. The ERO, the legal custodian of the roll, recognised the error, but the IT system prevented her from rectifying it.

That is the danger of centralisation dressed up as digitisation. A locally verified electoral roll is being replaced by a chain of opaque flags, matching failures and locked portals. The voter does not know why she has been marked and the ERO may not be able to correct it. The people running the system are not the officers to whom the law assigns the decision. But nevertheless it becomes theirs to make.

The Commission cannot invoke the authority of the RP Act while building a process that hollows out the officers through whom that Act operates.

A Commission losing public trust
Bengal’s SIR showed the stakes. The State went to the polls in April while more than 27 lakh deleted voters remained unable to vote and appeals were largely unresolved. Each case may have its own facts. The democratic fact is simpler: an election was conducted while millions of citizens were still fighting to regain a place on the roll. A decision after polling cannot return a vote that was lost.

This comes at a time when trust in the Election Commission is already under strain. Two Election Commissioners wrote separately to the Cabinet Secretary over changes affecting IT oversight, and later jointly rescinded the letters. The episode suggested an internal struggle over who controlled a crucial part of the electoral system.

We should also recollect that two election commissioners, Ashok Lavasa and Arun Goel both left the Commission even as they were expected to occupy as Chief Election Commissioner. Reasons for their unprecedented and sudden exits are still not clear to the larger public.

The Commission has always depended on something more fragile than statutory power: public confidence that it will not favour, frighten or casually exclude, to project its institutional power. Arbitrary deletions and the opaque centralisations weaken that confidence. Trust once lost is hard to regain.

Make verification the Commission’s work
RBI mandates that banks conducting KYC must send advance intimations and reminders, maintain an audit trail and give customers a chance to respond. Not delete based on a intensive revision and then ask for citizens to reclaim from the beginning. Imagine if an Aadhaar record, ration entitlement or bank account disappeared from the working system and the citizen was told to begin again. We would recognise the cruelty of the arrangement immediately.

An intensive revision may be necessary. But then the Commission must intensify its own work: hire staff, conduct field verification, record reasons, fix errors and retain voters on the roll while doubts are examined.

The Election Commission was created to ensure that no eligible voter is left behind. SIR, conducted in this fashion, turns that promise inside out. It makes the citizen carry the burden of the Commission’s uncertainty. And each person who discovers that she has vanished from the roll takes away something larger than a vote: it takes away the faith in the institution meant to protect it.