Rolls and loopholes: on the Bihar SIR and Aland  

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar has raised concerns, with deletions in some areas defying demographic patterns and statistical expectations. While the Opposition has claimed serious issues with rolls across the country, there is no clear-cut evidence as yet of fraudulent manipulation to benefit any political party. However, findings from the Aland constituency in Karnataka should set alarm bells ringing. Officials have unearthed thousands of Form-7 applications filed by miscreants, most of them designed to remove the names of legitimate voters from the rolls. Even this timely intervention was made possible by the diligence of local political leaders, rather than the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) initiative. An independent investigation, which confirmed that the applications were fraudulent, has since been stalled because the ECI has declined access to technical records, without which the trail disappears into a fog of dynamic IP addresses and disposable phone numbers. The Bihar SIR and Aland are nonetheless united by two issues: the absence of verifiable details and an ECI caught in a reactive, rather than proactive, stance. In Aland, the investigation’s fate now depends on the discretion of the election body whose systems were compromised. In Bihar, the ECI did not release the names and the reasons for deletion in a form that allowed external verification until the Supreme Court compelled it to do so.

The absence of mechanisms to allow independent tests of official ECI claims is the fault line along which the trust deficit between political parties and the ECI has grown. For parties, every change in the rolls alters the electoral field. While Bihar has many constituencies with close contests, a victory margin of fewer than 700 votes in a previous election in Aland has already politically charged the attempted forged deletion of nearly 6,000 voters in 2023. When explanations are partial or have to be painstakingly coaxed out, disputes that could be resolved by readily available data will obviously face the risk of morphing into contestations of difficult-to-verify competing claims of bias. Judicial intervention has since become central in Bihar, facilitating redress but also highlighting that essential steps were not taken until ordered. Banking on courts to secure disclosures shifts the balance of authority and leaves the ECI’s processes open to question. Each case may be explained by technical failures or administrative lapses, but together they show how the absence of verifiable evidence entrenches operational concerns into systemic suspicion. The responsibility to allay these concerns falls squarely on the ECI. To this end, rather than wait for yet another judicial intervention, the Commission must take the allegations from Aland seriously and assist the probe. It should also take steps to prevent Form-7 from being misused, especially to block voter deletion by proxy.