Former CEC S Y Quraishi: The deleted voter is not a new voter

Article 326 makes the electoral roll the gateway to the franchise: only a citizen whose name appears on it may vote. Article 324 vests 'superintendence, direction and control' of elections in the Election Commission of India (ECI), and the mechanics of preparing and revising rolls are laid down in the Representation of the People Act, 1950 (RPA 1950), with the detailed procedural rules framed separately as the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. A 'Special Intensive Revision' (SIR) is a more rigorous, door-to-door re-verification of every entry on the rolls, unlike the routine annual summary revision that mainly adds new 18-year-olds and removes the deceased or those who have shifted residence. A recent SIR exercise led to roughly 13 crore names disappearing from the draft rolls across several states, triggering concern over whether due process was followed.

Section 22 of the RPA 1950 requires an Electoral Registration Officer to give a person an opportunity of being heard before deleting their name, precisely because deletion strips a citizen of a constitutional entitlement. The present controversy is that the ECI, having itself directed officials to trace and restore wrongly deleted voters in twenty states and Union Territories, proposes to do so using Form 6, a form legally meant only for first-time applicants. This is also useful to recall alongside a simpler institutional point: the Constitution does not fix the ECI's own strength at any specific number; Article 324(2) leaves this to the President and subsequent law, and it is the ECI, not any ministry, that independently decides the election schedule and alone adjudicates disputes over splits or mergers of recognised political parties under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968. A body with such wide, largely unchecked discretion over the roll and the calendar of elections is correspondingly expected to exercise it with scrupulous procedural fairness.