Should the ECI verify citizenship while preparing electoral rolls? Critically analyse.

Article 326 restricts the franchise to citizens, so citizenship is logically prior to registration — yet its determination is vested by the Citizenship Act, 1955 in the Union Government, not the Election Commission. The revised Form 6 declaration under SIR has sharpened this tension.

Why a citizenship check is defensible

• Enrolment is conditional — citizenship, age 18, ordinary residence. Every ineligible name dilutes a genuine vote, so roll purity is itself a democratic value.
• Bihar's roll had gone unrevised since 2003, accumulating deaths, marriage-migration and duplication [1]; enumeration flagged about 65 lakh entries as deceased, permanently shifted or enrolled twice [2].
• The Supreme Court in ADR v. ECI (27 May 2026) held SIR to be within the ECI's statutory mandate under the RP Act, 1950 [3].

Why the ECI is nonetheless the wrong forum

• The declaration's cut-offs of 1 July 1987 and 2 December 2004 are borrowed from citizenship law [4] — a statute administered by another authority altogether.
• The Court upheld the power to revise rolls; it did not endorse a parents'-documents test as the way to settle nationality [3].
• Electoral Registration Officers have neither the record base nor the adjudicatory competence for nationality findings.

The inclusion cost falls on the weakest

• Every fresh 18-year-old was born after 2004 and so enters the heaviest tier — own document plus both parents' documents; where a parent was a non-citizen, a passport and visa valid on the birth date [4].
• Phase II, across 9 States and 3 UTs [5], asks applicants to quote their own or their parents' constituency, booth and serial number from the last SIR [4] — proof lodged in a State list, not in family custody. Orphans, single-parent households and migrants are worst placed.
• Deletion safeguards — hearing, written order, appeal to DM and CEO [3] — do not extend to a rejected fresh application.

The real question is therefore not whether citizenship matters, but who decides it and at what cost to inclusion. A workable middle path: the ECI screens eligibility and refers doubtful cases to the competent authority; publishes each State's base roll online, as Bihar's 2003 roll was [6]; and gives a rejected Form 6 the same reasons-and-appeal protection a deletion receives. Purity and inclusion then reinforce each other, as Article 326 intends.