Overview
- An Indian Express investigation published on Wednesday, September 23 reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally recorded objections at least 14 times over the last 10 months to decisions taken during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
- Opposition parties have seized on those disclosures to demand Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s removal or arrest and to revive a Rajya Sabha motion filed on April 24 seeking his ouster.
- The Election Commission has issued statements saying its final orders were unanimously approved, that differing views are normal in deliberations and that its actions carry full legal sanction.
- The dissenters and former CECs have pointed to concrete procedural and technical concerns, including contested changes to the statutory Form 6 for new voters, centralisation of the electoral-roll database, restricted field access to the ECINet portal, and a reported Goa software failure that left 97 eligible voters off the final roll.
- The controversy now runs on three tracks: Parliamentary removal procedures, possible criminal or administrative probes and ongoing Supreme Court scrutiny of the 2023 selection law that has been referred to a larger bench; the SIR itself has already removed about 130 million names from draft rolls across roughly 30 states and union territories, raising immediate questions about the validity of lists used in recent elections.