Examine the balance between the integrity of electoral rolls and the inclusiveness of the franchise when the burden of proof shifts to voters.

The Supreme Court in ADR v. ECI (2026) called the electoral roll "the legal record of that political community" [1]. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) requires electors to establish their own eligibility. That sets the ECI's duty to keep rolls pure under Article 324 against universal adult franchise under Article 326. The balance holds in law but remains fragile in practice.

Integrity: why shifting the burden is defended

• Clean rolls: names of dead, shifted and duplicate voters dilute genuine votes. Deletions are limited to these categories and untraceable electors, and only after BLO verification [4].
• Legal footing: the Court traced the SIR to Section 21(3), RP Act 1950 read with Article 324. It found the exercise proportionate and held that earlier inclusion creates only a rebuttable presumption [1].
• Participatory checks: draft rolls are published, and claims and objections can be filed through Forms 6, 7 and 8 [4]. Phase III also has 3.42 lakh party-appointed BLAs [2].

Inclusiveness: the costs of shifting the burden

• Attrition: Bihar's roll fell from 7.89 crore to 7.42 crore electors [3]. Public data do not separate genuine removals from eligible voters who could not prove eligibility.
• Documentation divide: migrants, the poor and women without documents bear the cost. Aadhaar was added only through the Court's 8 September 2025 order [1].
• Capacity strain: about 3.94 lakh BLOs serve 36.73 crore electors in Phase III [2], roughly 930 per BLO. Field errors therefore become exclusions.
• Citizenship spill-over: the ECI may make only a "limited enquiry" into citizenship. It must refer doubtful cases to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act [1]. Otherwise an administrative lapse turns into de facto disenfranchisement.

Restoring the balance

• Publish deletion counts by category and booth, so that genuine cleaning can be told apart from wrongful exclusion.
• Make court-ordered safeguards (Aadhaar as proof of identity, judicial review of wrongful deletions [1]) standard rules from the start of each phase.
• Share the burden: the state should first verify electors against existing records and ask for documents only where a mismatch remains.
• Keep paper and online channels open, with deadlines extended automatically when systems fail.

Integrity and inclusion are not rivals: a roll that wrongly excludes voters is as inaccurate as one carrying ghost voters. The Court's proportionality test provides the framework. Transparent data and a burden of proof shared with the state can make the SIR both clean and complete, honouring Article 326 and the Court's call for "care, fairness" [1].