What's in a List

In her landmark study, Why Electoral Integrity Matters, the political scientist Pippa Norris argues that an election is not a single event but a sequential chain of 11 links, starting with constituency delimitation and the compilation of voter rolls, through campaign conduct, to the counting of ballots and the acceptance of results. Break any one link and the chain weakens. There is, beyond that, another rupture more corrosive than the rest: when the rules of the electoral game are set unilaterally by the very actors who stand to gain from them. When that happens, elections cease to be the mechanism by which power is contested and instead become the mechanism by which power gets entrenched. India is now failing Norris’s test, not at the margins but at the very foundation of what makes its elections free and fair. The instrument of that failure is the Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls. 

The Election Commission of India launched the SIR in the run-up to assembly elections in Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It involved the door-to-door re-verification of nearly a billion registered voters. The exercise had not been conducted on such a scale for two decades. The ECI offered no public justification for the sudden overhaul. What followed was the greatest disruption of the electoral process India has ever seen—barring election boycotts and a rigged election in Kashmir in 1987—leading to the disenfranchisement of millions of voters.

Periodic maintenance of voter rolls in a country of India’s size and demographic complexity is a legitimate necessity. The electorate is mobile, mortality is continuous, and administrative inaccuracies accumulate. Routine cleaning prevents ghost voters and ensures that the register reflects the living, present electorate. But the SIR was not routine. It was rushed, opaque and structurally biased. Officials went door to door to distribute and collect enumeration forms. Voters who failed to return them were marked as absent, untraceable, deceased or duplicates, and summarily deleted. In Bihar, the process sent millions of people scrambling to prove their identity. Voters whose names could be traced back to the 2003 rolls could submit an enumeration form—a simpler, less onerous requirement. People whose names were not in the 2003 voter lists needed to provide additional documents—one of the 11 mandated by the ECI. Common documents such as Aadhaar cards, voter ID cards and ration cards were deemed invalid. The process required voters registered after January 2003 to provide proof of their name, date of birth and parents’ details. This was stricter than past intensive revisions. It became quickly evident that the process would impose a disproportionate burden on marginalised individuals: migrants, Adivasis, Muslims, women and informal workers.

The SIR in West Bengal differed from the Bihar exercise in its procedural design, in the scale of deletions and in a new category of “logical discrepancies,” that swallowed 2.7 million Bengal voters. Logical discrepancies flagged voters whose registration details contained internal inconsistencies, such as mismatched spellings and differing ages, determined by an algorithm whose methodology was never disclosed. This category was invented specifically for Bengal, leading to patently absurd situations. One sitting municipal councillor from the All India Trinamool Congress, having found his name removed from the rolls on account of his death, walked into a crematorium and demanded that his last rites be performed.