It has been over a year since the Election Commission of India (ECI) rolled out the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls. The ECI’s exercise has rendered potentially crores of legitimate voters ‘doubtful’, pausing, if not entirely ending, their right to vote. 

Out of over 5.18 crore voters deleted in 13 states and union territories, 60 percent (3.15 crore) deletions are of people classified as “shifted”. Which means, they were not found at the address they were registered to vote. 

The ECI has claimed it has done this purge of the voter list by following a water-tight system of scrutiny. 

Response to applications filed under the RTI Act by transparency activist Venkatesh Nayak shows this claim to be dubious. 

Before I get to his applications and the responses he got, or did not, let me take you through some dulling but vital reading of the regulations around detecting voters that might have shifted. Remember, these are regulations that the ECI itself set at one time. 

Before SIR

Before SIR, the ECI had an explicit set of step-by-step rules of how a voter would be classified as ‘shifted’. 

If someone complained that a voter did not live at the registered address, an Electoral Registration Officer (the highest officer in charge of an assembly constituency) would have to send a notice to the voter by speed post. The voter would get 15 days to respond. 

If the voter did not reply, the ERO would then send a Booth Level Officer (BLO) to the registered address of the voter to physically verify if he continues to live there or not. 

The ERO could delete the suspected shifted voter only after the BLO did not find the voter residing at that address and expiry of 15 days of notice period. 

But if the elector had responded to the notice, the ERO would have to conduct a quasi-judicial hearing in presence of the voter. The ERO would consider any objections raised to the voter’s rights and then decide if her or his name should stay on the voter roll or not. 

The process was elaborate and exacting, to ensure no legitimate voter gets deleted at the instance of others with vested interests. 

During SIR

During the SIR, in merely 90 days, crores of voters were declared ‘shifted’. On the face of it, this elaborate exercise for detecting and deleting shifted voters could not have been carried out for crores of voters over such a short period. 

But, the ECI had remained quiet about the procedure it had followed during SIR. 

So, piqued by the consequences of the SIR, Nayak asked the Chief Electoral Office (CEO) of Bihar if the ECI had followed these elaborate, strict and robust processes.

He asked three questions:

1. The number of instances in which EROs or their assistants dispatched notices to absent or shifted voters via speed post.
2. The number of instances in which EROs received replies from absent and shifted voters to the notices
3. And, the number of instances when the postal department returned the notices stating that the addressee was not found. 

The CEO is the top official at the state level who carries out all orders of the ECI. It passes down to the EROs and oversees their implementation. All records of the voter role registration and alterations are aggregated at his level. The ECI claims, now, owing to improvement in technology, the records get aggregated near real time. 

So, one would imagine, the CEO is a single source repository of all orders and records pertaining to voter lists in a state. 

But, when Nayak asked, the Bihar CEO did not clearly state whether ECI’s SIR mandate required them to follow the written down orders to detect and delete ‘shifted’ voters. 

In a classic route that many government authorities take to take the sting out of an RTI application, he sent Nayak’s application to all 38 district election offices, claiming the information sat with them. That would mean each district election officer is following their own procedures with discretion. We know this is not the case. 

So, Nayak showed patience and waited for the replies from these 38 districts. 

It has been eleven months since his RTI. By law everyone should have replied in 30  days. But to Nayak’s queries, only one subdivision of Patna district and another district headquarters of Hajipur deigned to even send a reply. 

The replies are revelatory. 

The Dulhin Bazar subdivision of Patna has confirmed that it did not follow the written down existing processes to purge shifted voters. It had not contacted any of the absent or shifted voters via speed post. 

Hajipur, the only district that replied, has played another bureaucratic game of telling half truths while avoiding stating a lie. It said the district had marked absent and permanently shifted voters based on a door-to-door survey conducted by the BLOs. 

If you remember me writing this earlier: All districts follow the same set of rules passed down from the state CEO’s office. Therefore what was good for Hajipur was good for all of Bihar. For all of Bihar electoral officers had not followed the written down orders of how to detect and delete ‘shifted voters’. 

What rules did they follow then? The answer to that remains buried in files of CEO Bihar and ECI that they won’t put before public even as they eviscerate existing regulations.

Why Should it Matter?

You might wonder, why am I reading so much into details of an exercise that has already potentially excluded crores of voters and yet has got the stamp of approval from the Supreme Court. 

For a few good reasons. 

In giving its stamp of approval, the Supreme Court had assessed that the measures adopted by the ECI to conduct the exercise were “sufficient procedural safeguards to prevent arbitrary exclusion”.

The response to Nayak’s RTI applications shows that was clearly not the case. 

We don’t know and might never know what were these safeguards adopted by the commission during the SIR, which was promised to be a more rigorous revision of voter rolls. 

Another reason: There is an old trick that those in power use to bypass problems of ‘illegality’. They bake discretionary power into a rule. The regulation now says officers have discretion to do what they think is best. Combined with opaqueness, it has often led to bad governance, corruption and all things that an authority should not indulge in. 

In the case of SIR, the ECI has got away with legally-baked discretion. The consequences of this discretion are there for all to see. And each month of the SIR more people are set to suffer it.