Goa High Court Orders Six Voters Added to Electoral Roll

The Bombay High Court’s Goa bench has directed the Election Commission of India to include Paresh Salgaonkar and five family members in the electoral roll within 10 days, after verifying their residence. The court also rejected the Commission’s request to suspend the order while it sought to challenge it in the Supreme Court. The family members live in the Santa Cruz constituency and petitioned after their names were missing from the rolls during the Special Intensive Revision, a process to prepare electoral rolls afresh. They said they had moved to a different address within the constituency and submitted Form 8 applications, which existing voters use to update details such as an address. The court allowed the petition and directed the constituency’s Electoral Registration Officer to include the six names after confirming their residence. The order is limited to the petitioners and does not decide the wider legal questions about the SIR that are before the Supreme Court. During the proceedings, the Election Commission argued that an absent name in a draft SIR roll was not necessarily a deletion from an existing roll. It said the rolls were being prepared afresh and that...