The unequal burden
of the SIR

There is a profound institutional irony when an administrative system designed to verify voters flags an election commissioner for a mismatch in his own name. Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu was among those served notices during Delhi’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) after his present entry did not match the earlier intensive-revision record. His details were later verified, and his name was retained. Former deputy prime minister L K Advani and Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri were among other prominent electors drawn into the process.The significance of these cases lies in what they reveal about the exercise’s scale and design. Delhi’s draft roll contains 97.53 lakh electors. Of them, 33.13 lakh, roughly one in three, were identified for notices: 19.33 lakh for “logical discrepancies” and 13.79 lakh because their entries could not be mapped to the 2002 roll. On September 22, the Supreme Court asked the Election Commission to examine whether notices were being issued mechanically, whether voters were adequately informed of the reasons, and to clarify the “logical discrepancy” category.The automated checks have flagged name and parent-name mismatches, unusual age gaps, and family relationships. Historical electoral records are not pristine databases. Names are spelt differently, initials change, addresses shift, and family relationships may be recorded inconsistently. A failed match with a two-decade-old roll may therefore reveal the limitations of the State’s own data rather than anything about a citizen’s present eligibility. Yet once a discrepancy is generated, that uncertainty becomes a new compliance burden for the voter.Gyanesh Kumar in the firing line over EC dissent and SIR, Opposition demands his arrestThat burden is not socially neutral. A notice may be formally identical whether it reaches a senior civil servant or a daily-wage worker. Their capacity to respond is not. Verification requires time, documents, transport, digital access, and familiarity with administrative procedures. For one citizen, a hearing may be an inconvenience. For another, it can mean losing a day’s wages or searching for records in another district or state.The consequences of such bureaucratic costs are well documented. A field experiment published in the American Political Science Review studied 2,306 migrants in Delhi and Lucknow who lacked local voter registration. The study found that 98% of eligible respondents wanted to register locally. Providing at-home assistance with completing and submitting registration documents increased registration by 24 percentage points and the turnout at the next election by 20 percentage points. The authors conclude that bureaucratic obstacles, rather than voluntary disengagement, were a significant barrier to migrants’ electoral participation.Bihar’s SIR demonstrated how such burdens operate. Field reporting found a daily-wage labourer who possessed an Aadhaar card, voter card, and MGNREGS job card, but none of these figured among the 11 documents then prescribed for verification. Booth Level Officers reported settlements where voters lacked any of the acceptable documents. Migrant families faced an additional difficulty, with women asking how husbands and sons working in Delhi or Punjab were expected to return to complete the process.These burdens follow existing patterns of socio-economic vulnerability. Migrant workers change addresses frequently, informal workers often live in temporary accommodation, and women may have names or addresses recorded differently after marriage. The very conditions that make people economically vulnerable can also make them harder for the State to verify.The State must correctThe Supreme Court recognised this problem while upholding the Bihar SIR in May 2026. It acknowledged that the burden of navigating the claims-and-objections framework could operate disproportionately against “migrant workers, rural populations, and socio-economically disadvantaged groups”. To address this “structural imbalance”, the Court relied on assistance through Booth Level Agents and para-legal volunteers, describing these interventions as “structural correctives”.The Election Commission’s own training and research institution has recorded a similar concern. A 2026 IIIDEM session report on voter registration notes that complex procedures and stringent documentation requirements disproportionately affect migrants, the urban poor, first-time voters, and remote communities. It also warns that fixed registration centres, limited timelines, and over-reliance on digital systems can exclude mobile and hard-to-reach populations. Among its general lessons is a “State Obligation Principle”, under which democratic maturity requires shifting the registration burden from citizens towards government.’Form 6 changes illegal, SIR a kind of Frankenstein creating fear in voters’ minds’: Former CECsThat principle goes to the heart of the problem exposed by SIR. Accurate electoral rolls are indispensable to free and fair elections. Deaths must be recorded, duplicate entries corrected, and ineligible registrations removed. But electoral integrity cannot be understood only as the prevention of wrongful inclusion. Wrongful exclusion damages the integrity of the roll as well.The difficulty with SIR is that the costs of correcting its errors fall unevenly. A formally universal verification exercise can become regressive when the ability to remain on the roll depends on income, mobility, documentary history, literacy, and access to the administrative State.Universal adult suffrage requires an electoral system that works as reliably for the migrant worker, the daily-wage labourer, and the citizen with the weakest documentary trail as it does for those best equipped to negotiate bureaucracy. Electoral verification should be judged not only by how effectively it identifies doubtful entries, but by whether it can do so without converting socio-economic disadvantage into an additional obstacle to the franchise.The writer is a Bengaluru-based lawyer and researcher.(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)

Source: Deccan Herald