The dissent, documented between October 2025 and August 2026, was lodged by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, who warned that the SIR process was being run in a manner that sidelined both the commission’s own officials and statutory electoral registration officers.
Joshi highlighted that Form 6 – the application used by new electors – could not be altered without a government amendment to the rules. Yet in July, the form was amended to ask whether applicants or their ancestors appeared on the “electoral roll of the last SIR”, a change Sandhu described as “unauthorised and illegal”.
Both commissioners also flagged the growing centralisation of the electoral roll database, calling for an independent audit and noting that field officials no longer had full access to the ERONet portal, a concern echoed by local election officers who said central‑level changes were overriding the decisions of Electoral Registration Officers, the bodies legally responsible for voter eligibility.
The fallout of these procedural anomalies has been most acute in West Bengal, where roughly 6 million electors were marked with software‑generated “logical discrepancies” and 2.7 million names were deleted from the draft rolls. Of the 3.8 million appeals pending before tribunals, 1.61 million were filed by individuals seeking to restore voters that judicial officers had previously reinstated, and more than nine in ten of the appeals decided so far have resulted in the restoration of the deleted electors.
A separate analysis by The Hindu found that in Delhi, 24 of the 70 parliamentary seats now show fewer registered voters in the draft rolls than the number of people who actually voted in the constituency a year and a half earlier, underscoring the scale of the discrepancies.
On the judicial front, Justice Dipankar Datta, sitting on a two‑judge bench, ruled that the 2023 amendment that replaced the Chief Justice of India on the election‑commission selection panel with a Union Minister fails the “perception test”. That panel had appointed Kumar as chief election commissioner. The Supreme Court had earlier upheld the SIR without scrutinising its design, which critics say shifts the burden of proving eligibility onto citizens and undermines the constitutional guarantee of universal adult franchise.
Legal scholars and opposition leaders are now urging Kumar to resign and asking the Supreme Court to suspend further deletions until an independent audit of the roll database is completed, warning that any continuation of the current process could constitute a defeat for India’s democracy.