Former officials question legality of election-roll changes

Reports of repeated objections within India’s Election Commission over its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls have prompted former election officials to question whether changes to voter-registration procedures were lawful. The Commission says its decisions, including those related to the revision, were ultimately unanimous; the reported objections and the legal status of the procedures have not been established by the records available here. The reports say Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi recorded objections at least 14 times over 10 months concerning electoral-roll decisions. Those objections reportedly covered changes to Form 6, used to register new voters, and the centralisation of control over the electoral-roll database. The reported count and details trace to a single account of internal communications, which have not been made public in the material reviewed. Former Chief Election Commissioner O.P. Rawat called the reported changes to Form 6 wrong and illegal, arguing that changes to the statutory form should have followed an amendment to the relevant rules. Former CEC S.Y.