Gates and windows: On the SIR and single-appeal window

The Election Commission of India (ECI)’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has a reasonable aim: to prune the duplicates, outdated addresses and entries for people who have died or moved, which India’s electoral rolls have a tendency to gather. But the ECI’s design of the ongoing SIR, modelled on the one in Bihar, infuses systemic flaws in the process that the body seems unwilling to address or even acknowledge despite many of the same problems in Bihar reappearing in multiple States. The process is happening at great speed that, together with the burden of inclusion being shifted from the state to the voter, suggests that the ECI is treating the exclusion of eligible voters as an acceptable risk. The speed would be justifiable given the availability of digital technologies today but they have their own tendencies to exclude, exemplified by the fact that the 2002-2005 electoral rolls, details from which the ongoing SIR expects citizens to invoke, are not machine-readable and the ECI has treated even minor mismatches as cause for deletion. The scale of exclusions reported in the phase I draft rolls should thus be read as a warning sign. It is not obviously reasonable to expect that one round of appeals will fix this in the final rolls.

The claims and objections processes correct errors only to the extent that affected voters detect and pursue them. That is, the appeals stage only adds a new filter, selecting for those with the time, literacy, connectivity, social support and confidence to deal with the state. If a person does not realise they have been deleted, cannot take time away from work, travel to an office, assemble documents or navigate forms and hearings, the error will become an official fact. Important information is not consistently available in a form that enables real-time public scrutiny, such as the precise reasons for deletions at granular levels and demographic breakups, including gender-wise patterns, preventing civil society, smaller political parties, journalists and voters from identifying where the process is failing while it can still be corrected. Finally, the SIR depends on house-to-house work, form distribution and collection, digitisation and repeated visits executed by State staff who simultaneously have other duties. When they are further constrained by tight deadlines, the risk of chasing targets instead of completing tasks becomes great. The current SIR in sum comes across as a form of administrative gatekeeping that stratifies the electorate into two tiers: those who can continuously re-prove themselves in the state’s preferred format and those who cannot. That outcome will not be corrected by a single-appeal window because the window is itself part of the gate.