At Wednesday’s hearing on the Delhi SIR petition in the Supreme Court, Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked questions.
Moreover, these questions cut to the heart of the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s SIR of electoral rolls.
Additionally, if a voter was lax or did not respond to forms, could that be a ground for forfeiture?
However, the bench said the ECI was in error to force such voters to reapply on Form 6.
Additionally, it asked why voters who had shifted residences could not disclose details.
Moreover, this is the design flaw of the SIR, as it shifts enrollment burden from the state to the elector.
The share of draft deletions recorded as ‘shifted’ or ‘absent’ rose from 55% in Bihar.
This rose to 72% in States/Union Territories in Phase 3.
In Karnataka, about 84 lakh electors were deleted, marked as ‘shifted’ or ‘absent’ during enumeration.
But only a net of 8.2 lakh, including new electors, was added during the claims phase.
The final roll was 64.5 lakh short of the projected adult population.
Moreover, moving voters to re-register as fresh applicants defeats the ECI’s historic mandate of widening the franchise.
This mandate was inherent in the 2002-03 intensive revision, where enumerators enrolled shifted voters at their new homes.
The Chief Electoral Officer reconciled the old entries.
Justice Bagchi also mentioned that the Bihar judgment was not a “binding precedent” and that the legality of “logical discrepancy” checks, allowed only as an “interim arrangement” in West Bengal, had not been finally adjudicated. No statute or rule provides for judging a voter’s eligibility on the basis of family size or the age gap between voters and parents, which were two of the ECI’s ludicrous and algorithm-driven “logical discrepancy” checks. In West Bengal these checks resulted in massive disenfranchisement and analysis found that in Delhi, Muslims were disproportionately flagged. But the Court should not merely issue managerial fixes such as extended deadlines or displaying printed lists in blocks, as it has in the past. The final SIR rolls are erroneous as deletions flowed from a flawed design rather than just lapses by the ECI. The dead and duplicate entries that the SIR identified should be removed and newly eligible electors added. Voters wrongly removed from draft rolls must be included again. The larger questions over the Commission’s SIR conduct and how its members are appointed must also be settled.