Expecting uneducated migrants to fill and upload online forms to enroll as voters is a flight of fancy. The Election Commission still has time to take corrective steps

A correct and up-to-date electoral roll is sine qua non for a free and fair election in a democracy. However, given the size, diversity, and geographical dispersion of population in India, we must also accept that a perfect, 100 percent correct electoral roll is an impossibility. Nonetheless, this cannot and should not detract us from continually ‘cleaning’ the electoral roll.

Viewed in this context, the Election Commission of India’s special intensive revision (SIR) of the Bihar electoral roll, announced on June 24, cannot be faulted. However, life is hardly ever so simple. The three documents issued by the ECI that day raise a number of questions, creating confusion. Some of these questions are legal, and some procedural and practical.

One of the major legal issues is the ‘disenfranchisement’ of all those citizens who were registered as voters by the ECI itself, following the laid down legal procedure, since January 1, 2003. There are two parts to this.

First, in their June 24 order, ECI says that for those on the electoral roll as on January 1, 2003, there is “probative evidence of eligibility, including presumption of citizenship”. This implies that this “presumption of citizenship” is not there for those registered as voters after January 1, 2003. This is grossly unfair because it amounts to depriving these people of their rights as citizens.

It is correct that Article 326 of the Constitution says that only citizens of India can vote in elections. But this Article is not the only stipulation on this matter. Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 titled ‘Conditions for registration’ states, “Every person who (a) is not less than 18 years of age on the qualifying date, and (b) is ordinarily resident in a constituency, shall be entitled to be registered in the electoral roll for that constituency.”

Form 6 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 also requires only a self-certification by the applicant that s/he is a citizen of India for registration as a voter. The irony is that a person in any state other than Bihar can get registered as a voter with a self-certification about citizenship today, whereas a person in Bihar has to provide one of 11 documents!

The second issue with this en masse disenfranchisement is that it violates the existing legal procedure for deletion of names from electoral rolls, specified in Section 22 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. This states, “...before taking any action… on the ground that the person concerned has ceased to be ordinarily resident in the constituency or that he is otherwise not entitled to be registered in the electoral roll of that constituency, the electoral registration officer shall give the person concerned a reasonable opportunity of being heard in respect of the action proposed to be taken in relation to him”.

This is valid as of today, but the irony is that the names of lakhs of registered voters in Bihar have been deleted by a simple administrative order in complete disregard of the existing law.

The procedural and practical issues are far too many for all of them to be listed, not to speak of discussing them. The timing of the exercise in terms of the proximity of the state assembly elections, during the rainy season when large areas of Bihar suffer annual floods, the non-availability of specified documents to a large proportion of the population, and the extremely short period provided for completing the mammoth exercise are just a few of them.

The issue that seems to have been completely underestimated by the ECI is that of migrants. A very large proportion of people from Bihar—the estimates vary between 20 percent and 50 percent—migrate to other states in search of livelihood. The bulk of them work as daily-wage labourers in large cities in a variety of jobs including a major chunk in the construction industry. Another major section works as agricultural labourers in Punjab and Haryana, where entire families migrate. Most of these people are not educated (some are even illiterate) and are economically and socially deprived.

Though the ECI continues to say that those who are not physically present in Bihar can download their Enumeration Forms from the ECI’s website, fill them up, and then upload the filled forms on the same site, the practicability of this is highly questionable. Expecting a daily-wage earner described above to go to a cybercafé, download forms, fill them, attach documents, and then upload them, appears to be a flight of fancy that the ECI has, consciously or otherwise, decided to follow. This will not happen; instead, the following scenario is more possible.

The names of thousands of migrants are likely to be missing from the draft electoral roll that the ECI will put up on August 1, 2025. These people will not be able to check the draft roll for the same reasons as those which would have prevented them from registering. Consequently, they will not file any ‘claims or objections’. Their names will, thus, not appear in the Final Electoral Roll that the ECI will publish on September 30, and these people will not even know that their names are not included in the Final Electoral Roll.

Not knowing the situation back home, these folks will turn up in their villages a day or two before the polling day, as they do during elections, expecting to cast their votes. The situation that might develop when a large number of people who have voted in all elections over the last 20-25 years find their names missing from the roll is not comfortable to visualise.

Notwithstanding the almost daily press notes issued by the ECI that the entire exercise is proceeding flawlessly and a huge number of Enumeration Forms have been collected ahead of time, and a few discomforting media reports, it is not too late for the ECI to think through the exercise till the end and rectify errors.

It is necessary to take corrective actions in time so that this does not turn out as a well-meaning action implemented through wrong or inappropriate means such as the US’s attempt to introduce democracy in Iraq.