Overview
- Thursday reporting said Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi raised objections to what they described as a gradual centralisation of the electoral-roll systems during the Special Intensive Revision process.
- The Election Commission has responded that ECINET is a decentralised platform where booth-level officers, assistant electoral registration officers, electoral registration officers, district election officers and state chief electoral officers use unique IDs and passwords to perform statutory functions.
- ERONET, the commission’s earlier electoral-roll back-end that unified roughly 36 state systems, has been integrated as the Electoral Roll module within ECINET and the two systems remain linked but distinct.
- The commission says it centrally provides cybersecurity for ECINET after detecting roughly 68 lakh malicious access attempts on a recent counting day, and it rejects claims that headquarters staff can carry out state officers’ statutory duties on the platform.
- The reported disagreement has not produced a formal resolution and could prompt closer scrutiny of access rules, the SIR process and how state election officials can restore or alter roll entries, a point highlighted by reports that EROs in Goa found eligible voters they could not restore because the software lacked a rollback option.