Does placing the burden of documentary proof on voters during electoral roll revision undermine universal adult franchise? Analyse.

Article 326 gives every citizen aged 18 or above the right to vote. Article 324, read with Section 21 of the RP Act, 1950, empowers the ECI to revise electoral rolls [2]. In the Bihar SIR case, the Supreme Court set out two concerns: no eligible citizen should be excluded, and the roll must reflect the true electorate [3]. Asking voters for proof is legitimate in principle. Whether it undermines the franchise depends on how the burden is designed.

How the proof burden erodes the franchise

• Presumption reversed: Only the 2003 roll counted as evidence of eligibility. Everyone else had to produce one of 11 prescribed documents [3].
• Scale of exclusion: About 65 lakh names were dropped from the draft roll. Of these, 36 lakh were marked "permanently shifted or not found", which is absence, not proof of ineligibility [3]. The roll shrank from 7.89 crore to about 7.42 crore [3][4].
• Falls on the document-poor: Migrants, the poor and first-time voters are hit hardest. A new ECINet declaration asks new voters whether their parents or grandparents were on the last SIR roll, which adds an ancestry-linked hurdle [1].
• Unprecedented: Former CEC O.P. Rawat said it was the first time since Independence that so many eligible electors had lost their vote [1].

Why the burden is not unconstitutional in itself

• A clean roll protects voters too: The drive found 22 lakh dead electors and 7 lakh multiple entries [3]. Such names enable impersonation, which dilutes honest votes.
• Stale roll: Bihar had no intensive revision after 2003 [2].
• Judicial correction: The Court ordered ECI to publish the excluded names with reasons (14 August 2025). It also made Aadhaar the 12th document [3].
• Remedies used: 21.53 lakh electors were added through Form 6 [4], and ECI reported "zero appeals" [5]. However, few appeals may reflect how hard it is to appeal, not that the roll is accurate.

Overall, a proof burden undermines universal franchise not in principle but when missing a house visit is treated as ineligibility and the vulnerable must prove otherwise. The way forward is to:

• publish booth-wise deletion lists by default;
• confirm a voter is enrolled elsewhere before deleting them as "shifted";
• keep Aadhaar as an accepted document in every phase;
• run independent sample audits of the final roll.

An inclusion-first design would honour Article 326 and the Court's twin concerns, so that a clean roll and a complete roll support each other.