Imagine you're a patient in a hospital and the hospital tells you:
“From tomorrow, we’ll maintain proper records of every important decision about your treatment.
We’ll make sure doctors can make the decisions, without being overridden by a computer system.
And if something goes wrong, we’ll investigate what happened.”
You are not going to simply say, “Waah- Great reforms.”
You would ask:
“Hello, Wait. What was happening till yesterday?”
That is exactly where we need to begin with the Election Commission of India.
After months of questions over its functioning, the ECI has suddenly announced a series of changes: agendas will be circulated, minutes recorded, IT systems screened, and some SIR-affected voters given additional assistance.
But these aren't just changes for tomorrow. They raise questions about what happened yesterday: what procedures were followed, who made the decisions, and who authorised them?
Let Me Explain
For months, the ECI has insisted that everything is fine, despite many many reports flagging the problems.
CEC Gyanesh Kumar dismissed the allegations as fear-mongering.
The panic began when The Indian Express revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi recorded at least 14 formal objections in ten months.
First, ECI brushed these off as mere "operational queries”
They insisted that differing views are just part and parcel of everyday institutional deliberation.
Nothing unusual.
And then, just three days later... the plot thickened.
On September 26, the full Commission quietly rolled out a series of what they are claiming as major administrative reforms.
Take Point 6. It says that agendas for all Commission meetings will be circulated in advance and minutes issued. Imagine, this basic procedure wasn't followed before.
What else did the statement say?
New IT modules have to pass a screening committee. ECINet will be reviewed by an independent IIT or IIIT expert. Field officers will get more flexibility, vulnerable voters will get help desks, and some SIR notices will be handled through house visits by BLOs.
If the ECI is suddenly promising all these basic safeguards, what was happening until now?
So what is the Election commission of India trying to sell us as "relief”?
If your name got flagged for "logical discrepancies" or marked as "unmapped" during the SIR, you may no longer be forced to physically show up before an ERO–Electoral Registration Officer.
Instead, Booth Level Officers or BLOs will come right to your doorstep, collect your documents, and upload them straight to ECINet.
Before you get fooled into thinking these are fixes, hold your horses.
House-to-house visits by BLOs aren't a revolutionary breakthrough. They were already part of the SIR mandate. And there is no guarantee overworked BLOs can reach every household.
More importantly, many people simply don't have the documents SIR demands to prove their or their family's presence in earlier rolls.
Low-income, migrant and homeless families are especially unlikely to have decades-old birth certificates or land records. Taking the paperwork requirement to their doorstep doesn't solve that problem.
And let’s talk about the timing. These tiny operational tweaks are arriving right as SIR drive is getting over in many states.
The SIR has already wrapped up across more than 20 states. Millions of people in those states who were dropped from the rolls won't get a single shred of benefit from these belated concessions.
Take Goa, for example.
An internal review revealed that 97 legitimate voters, people already cleared by local officials, were stripped from the final rolls simply because of a software glitch. So what did the ECI do? In its press note, it proudly declared that 81 of those 97 voters have now filled out Form 6 to get back on the list.
That’s your remedy?
Form 6 is specifically meant for 18-year-olds registering to vote for the very first time! Forcing a 70-year-old citizen, who was already verified, but erased by an algorithm, to re-apply like a fresh teenager is not relief. It is harassment.
The worst part of this press release isn’t what it says, it’s what it completely ignores.
There’s a list of serious, structural violations that haven't been fixed.
Now let's talk about the first massive red flag: central software stepping over the law.
Under Indian election law, the ERO is the statutory authority allowed to add, modify or delete a voter's name. A central IT team or automated algorithm cannot override that authority.
Yet, with ECINet, that’s exactly what happened.
Centralised software repeatedly overrode decisions made by field officers.
Ritika Chopra of the Indian Express found that when EROs in Goa tried to restore voters who were wrongfully flagged, they found out the central system literally didn't have an "undo" button.
Now, the ECI says they're forming a committee with IIT or IIIT experts to review ECINet.
That’s a direct admission that this software was deployed without proper testing in the first place.
So here’s the big question: what happens to all the valid voters deleted by glitchy software over the last 10 months?
There is still no mechanism to restore them.
Issue number two: someone illegally tweaked Form 6 behind closed doors.
During the revision drive, a mandatory parent-verification question was quietly slipped into the online Form 6 interface.
If you were applying online and couldn't answer whether you or your ancestors were in the previous revision rolls, the system locked you out.
On August 13, Commissioner Sandhu clearly called this alteration "unauthorised and illegal" and demanded it be scrapped.
Commissioner Joshi pointed out that you cannot alter statutory forms under the 1960 Registration of Electors Rules without legislative amendments.
And what does the ECI say in its defence now?
They vaguely claim standard Form 6 rules will apply "outside the revision period."
They didn't answer a single actual question.
Who inserted and approved that unauthorised field in July? Has it been removed? And why did it remain live after a sitting Commissioner called it illegal?
Instead, they tried to hide behind the Supreme Court, claiming the Court "upheld" their revision process.
The Supreme Court did acknowledge the ECI's power to conduct the revision. But that does not mean it authorised the Commission to add digital barriers to statutory forms.
The barrier was put up, millions were processed through a flawed digital gatekeeper, and the Commission's response is to simply pretend it never happened.
Also, what about basic accountability for the people who actually ran this show?
The ECI's press note is totally silent on Seema Khanna, the ECI’s Director General of IT, the official running the Commission’s central tech platforms.
The dissenting commissioners called her out for using central software to lock local officers out of the voter list.
Yet, the note doesn't say a word about whether she keeps her job or faces any investigation.
And what about Maneesh Garg, the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner? Both dissenting commissioners accused him of secretly changing internal duty rosters without the full Commission's permission.
This move, they say, blocked dissenting commissioners from inspecting or auditing the ECI's central voter database software.
The ECI’s response? Total silence
So look closely and you will see that what the ECI gave isn't a genuine course correction.
It's a PR cleanup job meant to calm the public
Because the sheer numbers coming out of this revision drive are staggering. Across 30 states and Union Territories, over 13 crore names were wiped from the draft rolls.
That leaves us staring right at a paradox.
Option A: If deleting millions of voters is right, then previous elections that even the BJP won were on fake, bloated lists.
Option B: If past elections were fine and these are genuine voters, then this current drive is a disaster that stripped millions of real citizens of their right to vote.
You just can't have it both ways.
Sure, the ECI is now promising better oversight.
But that doesn't answer the primary question: what happened during those ten months when two Election Commissioners were recording objections?
The ECI keeps claiming all major decisions had the full Commission's concurrence.
If there was complete consensus, show us the paper trail. Show us how those objections were reviewed and resolved.
If an illegal software feature was introduced, tell us who authorised it and whether it is still running.
And if legitimate voters were erased, don't just restore them. Explain how they were deleted.
An institution tasked with guarding Indian democracy cannot just tell citizens how it plans to behave better starting tomorrow.
It has to answer for what it did yesterday.
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Produced by Megha Mukundan, script by Pooja Prasanna, Edit by Nikhil Sekhar ET, Camera by Ajay R