"Transparency in electoral rolls is a precondition for public trust in the Election Commission." Comment on recent ECI measures in this light.

Article 324 gives the Election Commission of India (ECI) control over electoral rolls. The Supreme Court has held that roll revision comes from this mandate and serves free and fair elections [4]. The roll decides who may vote, so people will trust it only if they can see how names are added or removed. Recent ECI measures meet this test only in part.

Why transparency underpins trust

• Scale of change: Bihar's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) reduced electors from about 7.89 crore to 7.42 crore, after about 65 lakh draft removals [2]. Changes this large invite suspicion unless the reasons are visible.
• Burden of proof: Ancestry declarations and mapping to old rolls moved the burden of proof from the State to the voter. This hits migrants and the poor hardest.
• Neutrality: Disputes over rolls shape whether losing parties accept the result as legitimate.

Measures that strengthen trust

• Searchable text-PDF rolls for parties and candidates allow scrutiny at booth level.
• Special drive to re-enrol "left-out" electors through the original Form 6, without the ancestry declaration.
• Cap on Form 7 objections, which curbs bulk deletion requests.
• Annual summary revision resumed, with 1 January as the qualifying date [1].
• Safeguards: at least two or three BLO visits before anyone is marked untraceable, random audits of deleted entries, and party Booth Level Agents [3].

Gaps that still erode trust

• Implicit admission: Re-enrolments are not reported separately from fresh enrolments, so the number of wrongful SIR deletions is still unknown.
• Aggregated data: Deletion totals lump together deaths, people who moved, duplicates and "untraceable" names.
• A cap is not a check: One false Form 7 can still remove a genuine voter if there is no proper hearing.
• Citizenship: The Court held that the ECI's view on citizenship cannot be final. The ECI must refer such deletions to the authority under the Citizenship Act within four weeks [4].
• Time pressure: Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand vote in early 2027.

Recent steps move the ECI away from closed verification and towards open scrutiny. But to earn trust, the ECI must measure how many names were wrongly removed, not just quietly put some back. It can do this by publishing booth-wise deletions by ground, reporting re-enrolments separately, and restoring names through house-to-house visits instead of fresh applications. That would let the ECI keep rolls both clean and inclusive, protecting universal adult franchise and making transparency the basis of its credibility.