Hearing in Supreme Court on SIR of voter lists and functioning of Election Commission

The Supreme Court is hearing petitions on Monday in which questions have been raised on the functioning of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

The petitions have demanded a SIT inquiry against him and declaring the nationwide Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists illegal.

The hearing in this case is being conducted by the bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana.

These petitions were filed a few days after a report by The Indian Express.

It was reported in the report that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had filed objections at least 14 times on decisions and orders related to SIR of voter lists in the last 10 months.

Let us know what the Supreme Court has said so far in the case of people who have been left out of the voter list of West Bengal.

"These are just by-elections, that's all."

On September 26, 2026, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant had refused an urgent hearing on the petition of people claiming to be excluded from the voter list of West Bengal with these words.

The counsel for the petitioners had told the court that people who were left out of the voter list in Nandigram and Rejinagar assembly constituencies were not able to vote during the assembly elections in April.

The lawyer said that if the decision on his appeal is not taken, he will not be able to vote in the by-election to be held on October 6.

He told the bench of three judges that more than 18 thousand appeals were pending. But the bench did not accept the demand for immediate hearing of the case.

This thing also becomes important because the main opposition parties including the Cockroach Janata Party have started protests to remove the Chief Election Commissioner from the post.

This hearing was a new episode of the case, on which hearing has been going on in the Supreme Court for more than a year.

At the heart of this matter is the Special Intensive Revision of Voter List or SIR. The Election Commission of India had started this campaign of door-to-door checking to update the voter list.

The Election Commission says that this process is necessary to remove the names of voters who are dead, registered at more than one place, have moved to another place and people who are not citizens of India.

The petitioners challenging this process say that this puts the burden on voters to show documents and snatches away the right of eligible citizens to vote.

The court allowed the SIR process to continue in Bihar and also declared it legal in May.

But in West Bengal the court played a more active role in this process.

The responsibility of investigating lakhs of voters was given to a tribunal comprising serving judicial officers and retired High Court judges.

Along with this, the court also said that people left out of the voter list cannot vote until their appeal is heard.

The first hearing on the petitions against SIR was held in July 2025. At that time SIR was started a few months before the assembly elections in Bihar.

The two-judge bench had said that this question "goes to the root of the functioning of a democratic republic."

The court had fixed three issues for hearing.

Does the Election Commission have the authority to do this?

Is the procedure adopted by the Commission in accordance with the law?

Is the time limit for this very short?

The court did not stop the SIR process. However, it suggested to the Election Commission that Aadhar Card, Voter ID Card and Ration Card should also be accepted as documents to check the identity of voters.

Chief Justice Surya Kant did not consider the petition seeking to stop the publication of the draft voter list.

However, he told the petitioners, "If we agreed with you, we would cancel everything."

In August, the bench directed the Election Commission to publish the names of about 65 lakh people left out of the draft voter list and the reasons for their deletion.

Chief Justice Surya Kant said, "If Poonam Devi's name has been removed, then Poonam Devi should know that her name has been removed and why."

On September 8, the court ordered that Aadhaar card be accepted as the 12th valid document proving identity.

However, the court also clarified that Aadhaar card "will not be considered as proof of citizenship."

After the final voter list was published on September 30, Chief Justice Surya Kant said, "Every person has the right to appeal."

Questioning the arguments of the petitioners, Chief Justice Surya Kant had asked, "What will happen if the voter lists are copied and pasted every year without any changes?"

However, he stressed that the court was not reaching any conclusion.

Justice Joymalya Bagchi also said that these are questions, "not our conclusion."

In Bihar, the petitions challenging the SIR were heard for 29 days. The court had reserved its decision on January 29.

By that time the process of SIR had been completed in Bihar and Bihar Assembly elections were also held in November 2025.

By January the SIR process had reached West Bengal. Here a new term emerged in this matter – 'logical inconsistency'.

Voters were marked for scrutiny on the basis of discrepancies visible in their documents. These included things like father's name or age difference between parents.

In January, the court recorded that about 1 crore 36 lakh voters were placed in this category.

On February 4, Chief Justice Surya Kant said that "genuine and genuine people cannot be left out of the voter list" because of spelling mistakes.

Five days later, Justice Bagchi raised questions on the artificial intelligence based software used to issue the notice.

He said that 'Kumar' is the middle name in Bengali families. But due to the difference like 'Tapan Roy' being written instead of 'Tapan Kumar Roy', a notice of logical discrepancy was issued.

He said, "The ground reality is that notices are being sent on a large scale due to the use of software."

Criticizing this automated method, senior lawyer Mohan Katarki said that "the Supreme Court could not catch the real error."

He told the BBC, "The purpose of the SIR was to remove the names of dead and relocated voters. Instead, the names of 13 crore Indians were removed through a secret algorithm. Reasons given for this included 'logical inconsistency', 'no mapping' and 'age difference'. The machine also considered the difference in spelling as an error. There is no transparency about the code of the machine. It seems that the Election Commission has misled the Supreme Court. Did."

On February 20, the court said there was a "trust deficit" between the West Bengal government and the Election Commission as the two could not agree on which authorities should decide on the claims.

The court asked the Calcutta High Court to make available the serving and retired judicial officers.

These officers were to investigate 'logical inconsistency' and claims of people who could not be linked to the old records of the voter list.

Four days later, the court increased the number of judicial officers in view of the large scale of this process.

The court also gave permission to call officials from Odisha and Jharkhand.

Along with this, the court said that after the release of the final voter list, supplementary lists can also be published. The names included later will also be considered part of the final voter list.

On March 10, the court ordered the formation of an appellate tribunal headed by retired High Court judges.

During this, Chief Justice Surya Kant said, "Now such a situation has come where we are doubting the intentions of both the parties."

He was referring to the differences between the Election Commission and the West Bengal government.

By April 1, decisions had been taken on more than 46 lakh out of approximately 60 lakh objections.

In the hearing held that day, Justice Bagchi said that the mistake of wrongly deleting or adding a name from the voter list can be corrected by the tribunal after the elections.

He said, "If a person is today excluded from the electoral roll and is unable to vote in this election, but the tribunal headed by a former Chief Justice finds that it was not appropriate to exclude him, then we see no reason why that decision cannot be reversed and that person's name cannot be added to the list again."

By the time elections approached in April, more than 34 lakh appeals had been filed.

In its order dated April 13, the court said that the results of the appeals which are decided by April 21 or 27 will be included in the supplementary voter lists.

But the court also said that people excluded from the list on the basis of "mere appeal pending" would not get the right to vote.

Chief Justice Surya Kant said, "If we allow this, then the right to vote of the people included in the voter list should also be stopped."

Justice Bagchi said that one should not assume that the bench was "ignoring the alert voter whose name is not in the list for right or wrong reasons."

He said the right to vote is "the greatest expression of nationalism and patriotism".

He gave an example of a hypothetical situation.

If 15 per cent of the 'mapped' voters who can be linked to the 2002 voter list are unable to vote and the outcome of that seat is decided by a margin of two per cent of votes, he said, "we will definitely have to consider it."

However, he did not give any opinion on this.

He said that in a process of such a large scale, "there is always some margin for error." The appeal system has been created only to correct such mistakes.

In an earlier hearing, he had said that the court does not want to complete the appeal process in a hurry.

On May 27, the court announced its verdict in the Bihar case.

The bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Bagchi declared the SIR legal.

The court said that both the provisions of the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act permit the Election Commission to conduct special review "in such manner as it deems fit".

In the decision, this was considered a “broad and unlimited power” given to the Election Commission.

The court said that the question is not whether she herself would have chosen a better way or not. The question is whether the Election Commission's chosen method was "manifestly excessive" or not.

The court said that the law "does not mandate the adoption of the least restrictive method."

The judgment said that where a problem is "systemwide and widespread", the extensive measures taken to deal with it cannot be considered disproportionate on this basis alone.

Explaining why it would not implement its preferred method over the one chosen by the Election Commission, the court said, "This Court cannot review whether the process and method adopted by the Commission for SIR was the best or most appropriate option."

The decision acknowledged that the process "as initially designed gave rise to legitimate concerns about documentation, transparency and public access."

But the court said these concerns were allayed by its own intervention.

These included including Aadhaar card as valid documents and publishing the list of about 65 lakh voters who were excluded from the voter list.

The court said that the data did not prove that "people were deprived of the right to vote on such a large or systematic scale that it would show a constitutional deficiency."

The court said that cases like "exclusion of the name of a particular person" can be settled through appeal.

The decision said that the effectiveness of a process should be examined not only on the basis of its theoretical framework, but also on the basis of the way it is implemented.

The petitioners had taken recourse to an old decision of the Supreme Court.

According to that decision, it is legally assumed that the people whose names are already present in the voter list have been correctly included in it.

But the court said that this belief can be proved wrong by providing evidence. The court also said that the earlier decision was "limited to the process of giving a judicial decision on a case".

The bench said that this recognition "cannot be used as a shield to obstruct the exercise of constitutional rights."

The judgment drew a "clear and principled distinction" between the two matters in the case of citizenship.

On the one hand, there is a "limited investigation" by the Election Commission for the voter list and on the other hand, there is a formal decision on the citizenship of a person. The central government has the right to take formal decisions on citizenship.

Commenting on the decision, Professor Faizan Mustafa, Vice Chancellor of Patna's Chanakya National Law University, told the BBC that the Bihar decision "at first glance appears to be in line with past decisions. However, it would have been better if the court had shown a little more strictness."

He said that "some aspects of this decision are also controversial."

Professor Mustafa said, "But now the Supreme Court is fully aware that 13 crore people have been excluded. It should now intervene more effectively to save the credibility of the Indian electoral system."

Former Supreme Court judge Justice Madan B. Lokur also expressed concern over the attitude of the court regarding the process conducted on such a large scale.

He said, "This is a very serious matter. The Supreme Court should have taken more time to decide on this."

"The court should have looked at the impact of the SIR in detail and studied its impact on citizens in depth," he said.

On May 11, the petitioners said that in at least 31 assembly seats in West Bengal, the number of people removed from the voter list was more than the margin of victory.

In August, Justice Bagchi said that excluding a person's name from the list was tantamount to "taking away his right to vote". He said that such appeals should be given priority.

In the affidavit given on September 16, the Election Commission said that out of 38 lakh appeals, the decision has been taken on about 1 lakh 26 thousand.

The commission said that in the petition seeking cancellation of election results of 31 seats, "all the categories of deletion of names have been mixed together."

These categories included voters who were absent, had moved to another place, were dead and were registered at more than one place.

In Nandigram, out of 6,443 appeals, names of 89 people were re-added to the voter list.

In Rejinagar, names of four people were added out of 12,452 appeals.

Now the hearing of this case is to be held on October 5.

This date is a day before the by-elections to be held in Nandigram and Rejinagar.