ECINet's Central Switch: The Code That Can Cut a State's Access to India's Voter Roll

Updated Nov. 2, 2026 - added the Election Commission’s own post-revision totals for the 5 states that have finished: an electorate of 18.71 crore reduced to 16.43 crore, 2.29 crore fewer voters, 12.2 percent, with Uttar Pradesh carrying nearly 90 percent of the drop and the share of deleted names restored back to the roll varying from 34 percent in Punjab to 3 percent in Uttarakhand. Added the Nov. 1 march on Ramlila Maidan, which the bloc held, and the Nov. 2 answer from the Home Minister, who called 3 crore of the deleted names “infiltrators” and offered a special session of Parliament. The INDIA bloc’s march is no longer a future event on this page, and the deleted-voter count now has the Commission’s own arithmetic under it.

Correction, Nov. 1, 2026. The INDIA bloc’s Oct. 31 “public impeachment” hearing was held in the garden of the Congress president’s residence at 10, Rajaji Marg, with former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar chairing. It was not at Ramlila Maidan, which is the venue for the bloc’s Nov. 1 march. The West Bengal-only restriction opened after the Sept. 23 and Sept. 26 disclosures, not with them. The count of 3.8 million stalled cases was right; calling them “citizenship appeals” was not. They are SIR appeals before 19 tribunals: 38.31 lakh in all, 22.21 lakh filed by voters the roll excluded. The line that the Supreme Court kept Delhi’s roll open past Oct. 30 was wrong: the Election Commission’s Oct. 29 letter moved Delhi to Dec. 22 and 5 states to Nov. 30, and the court had separately removed the Oct. 30 deadline for additions on Oct. 28. See the corrections log.

The switch is in the code. The question is who can flip it.

India’s voter roll now runs through a single unified portal. An independent civic audit discovered a central switch capable of severing state field officers from the electoral roll, alongside an exclusion specifically targeting West Bengal.

The code also exposes a secret mechanism to tag individual electors as “VIP” and export their rosters, with zero published criteria.

The audit found capability, not execution. It proves the switch exists, not that it was flipped. The Election Commission insists the platform is transparent, but continues to withhold the operational rules that govern the switch.

On Oct. 31, a state pulled 806 logins. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer ordered every ECINet login held by a computer assistant in the state switched off. The reason in the official statement was the misuse of those logins.

The Commission will not name the software. Asked under the Right to Information Act which program flags errors in the roll, it said the answer is a trade secret.

On Nov. 2 the count arrived. The 5 states that have finished the revision hold about 2.29 crore fewer electors than they did before it, on the Election Commission’s own data and the state chief electoral officers’. That is roughly 12.2 percent of an electorate of 18.71 crore. It is the first figure in this argument produced by the machinery rather than quoted at a press conference, and it is still not a reconciliation: Punjab put 34 percent of its deleted names back on the roll, Uttarakhand put 3 percent back, and no reason for the gap has been published.

By the numbers: 1 platform. 2 dissenting commissioners. 14 written objections. 1 state named in the code. 1 VIP tag with no published criteria. 806 ECINet logins switched off by 1 state order on Oct. 31. 2.29 crore voters fewer across the 5 states whose revision is finished. 0 published switch logs.

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The story in 30 seconds

• Jan. 22, 2026: The ECI launches ECINet, the unified portal for roll work.
• May to September 2026: 2 election commissioners object at least 14 times to centralization and access curbs.
• Oct. 2 to 19, 2026: Charchagram examines the public front-end code and finds a state-wise kill switch, a West Bengal-only restriction on EROs and AEROs, and a VIP voter tag with a downloadable list; the audit shows capability, not use, and server-side enforcement is unverified.
• Oct. 21-23: The Wire reveals the VIP tag; the Congress calls vote theft a proven reality; Delhi Police enforce BNSS Section 163 against the People Against SIR march.
• Oct. 24-29: The Commission refuses an RTI request for the SIR software, citing trade secrets; it extends Delhi’s final roll to Dec. 22 and 5 other states to Nov. 30; the Supreme Court asks why a deleted voter must file a first-time registration form and removes the Oct. 30 deadline for additions; Human Rights Watch puts the national deletion at 130 million.
• Oct. 30-31: The Supreme Court declines to order a formal extension, calling enrolment “a continuous process”, then clarifies that the roll is not frozen; Delhi starts re-verifying 47.56 lakh deleted voters; Bengal officers are found to have filed 16.1 lakh appeals against restored voters; The Hindu finds booth agents filing deletion forms against Muslim voters in Mustafabad, and the Commission concedes Form 7s were filed in bulk in Uttar Pradesh and calls them false; Uttar Pradesh switches off the ECINet logins of 806 computer assistants after the Pilibhit and Azamgarh credential misuse; the INDIA bloc tries the Chief Election Commissioner on 6 charges in the garden at 10, Rajaji Marg; a Telangana social audit traces 23 percent of deleted voters in 1 constituency; the BJP says not a single vote has been stolen.
• Nov. 1: The INDIA bloc marches from Minto Road to Ramlila Maidan against “vote chori” and holds the rally; Rahul Gandhi says Gyanesh Kumar “will go to jail”; the Congress claims a massive turnout and publishes no count.
• As of Nov. 2, 2026: The Commission’s own data puts the 5 finished states at 2.29 crore fewer voters, 12.2 percent of 18.71 crore. The Home Minister calls 3 crore of the deleted names “infiltrators”, dares the Opposition to a debate and offers a special Parliament session. The ECI has published no software name, no access matrix, no switch log and no VIP criteria.

ANIMATED EXPLAINER / CODE AUDIT

The Switch

A code audit of India's voter roll.

CONSTITUTIONALElection CommissionArticle 324

→

SOFTWAREDG(IT) / SNOcentral access

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STATUTORYWest Bengal ERO/AEROenumeration forms

STATE ACCESSONOFF

"View enumeration form details is not enabled for selected State."

WHAT THE CODE SHOWSCentral disable. State toggle. West Bengal exception.

WHAT IT DOES NOT SHOWUse. Intent. Server enforcement.

Illustrative diagram. Source: Charchagram audit, Oct. 2026. Not a live system.

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What this story is, and is not

This story is	This story is not
A code audit of ECINet’s public front end.	A test of the live ECINet server.
Evidence that a central switch exists.	Evidence that the switch was used.
Evidence of a West Bengal-only exception.	Proof of intent or political motive.
Evidence of a VIP voter tag with no published criteria.	Proof that the tag was used to favor or remove voters.
A demand for the access rules and logs.	A claim that the roll was changed.

The audit found capability, not use. The Commission can settle the rest by publishing the rules and the log.

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What the audit found in the code

The forensic code audit was conducted by Charchagram, an independent civic-tech initiative led by data scientist Saurav Rajput, an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta.

Rajput inspected the public front-end JavaScript bundles between Oct. 2 and Oct. 19. He used no unauthorized access, bypassed no passwords, and called no internal APIs. He simply read what the browser downloads before a user signs in.

By the numbers (The code audit):

• 4 central controls identified in the client-side JavaScript bundle
• 1 state explicitly singled out for exclusion: West Bengal
• 1 unmapped “VIP” voter classification feature
• 0 server-side tests performed (capability proven, live execution unverified)

Finding 1: The State Nodal Officer disable action. The code exposes a State Nodal Officer management console that allows central administrators to provision, update, or disable the designated officer for any state. A system prompt explicitly warns: once disabled, “the user will no longer be able to access the application.”

Finding 2: The state-by-state enumeration toggle. The application bundles a state-level toggle for voter enumeration records. When switched off, the interface returns: “View enumeration form details is not enabled for selected State.”

Finding 3: The hardcoded West Bengal blackout. The “View Enumeration Form Details” tile is configured for field registration officers nationwide, with 1 explicit programmatic exception. The code hardcodes a conditional excluding West Bengal’s Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs (AEROs) from both the voter form view and the notice-and-hearing dashboard.

Finding 4: The secret VIP voter tag. The code contains a function that tags specific electors as “VIP”, displaying a gold emblem beside their names on internal administrative consoles. It includes an export module allowing operators to download constituency-level VIP rosters filtered by state, district, and polling part.

The 4 findings fit in 1 table.

Feature	What the code does	What it does not prove
State Nodal Officer disable	Cuts a state’s designated user off from the application.	That it was used, or on whose order.
State-wise enumeration toggle	Turns the enumeration form tile on or off for a state.	That any state’s access was actually turned off.
West Bengal exception	Excludes West Bengal EROs and AEROs from the form and the hearing dashboard.	Why West Bengal is different, or who ordered it.
VIP voter tag	Marks some voters with a gold symbol and allows a downloadable list by constituency.	What “VIP” means, who assigns it, or who can download it.

The audit boundaries: Charchagram’s investigation strictly evaluated the public front-end code. It did not probe backend databases and cannot verify whether restrictions were actively enforced or whether VIP lists were ever exported.

The timeline of the bundle: The West Bengal exclusion existed in production code from at least Sept. 28. Following a new production build on Oct. 16, the conditional remained untouched when inspected on Oct. 19.

The official silence: The Election Commission declined to answer detailed questions submitted by Hindustan Times. Across its two public notes on Sept. 23 and Sept. 26, the commission published neither the role-access matrix, the toggle logs, nor the VIP classification rules.

A public front end is not the whole system. It is the part that tells users what the system can do. That is why the code matters.

A switch is not a crime. A secret switch is a governance problem.

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Words that matter

The code and the law use different words for the same power. These are the terms that matter.

Term	What it means
ECINet	The Election Commission’s unified portal for electoral roll work.
ERO / AERO	The Electoral Registration Officer and Assistant ERO. The ERO prepares and revises the roll under the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
SIR	Special Intensive Revision, the roll cleanup at the centre of this story.
SNO	State Nodal Officer, the state’s designated user on ECINet.
DG(IT)	The Commission’s IT division, which runs the platform.
ERONet	The Commission’s existing electoral roll network.
Form 6	The application to add a new voter to the roll.

These terms matter because the law and the software do not use the same map.

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Why a software switch matters in a statutory roll

The law is unequivocal about statutory ownership of the electoral roll. The Representation of the People Act, 1950 vests the Electoral Registration Officer with the legal mandate to prepare and revise voter lists. Article 324 grants the Election Commission superintendence, direction, and control.

The ERO is the statutory decision-maker. The software is merely the conduit. If the conduit can be choked off remotely from Delhi, statutory decentralization becomes an illusion.

The internal revolt: This conflict is not theoretical. Over the last 10 months, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally raised at least 14 objections to centralizing changes forced through Nirvachan Sadan.

Joshi’s audit demand: On May 29, Commissioner Joshi wrote to CEC Gyanesh Kumar urging an external technical audit with IIT computer science experts. He demanded independent verification that “no one, except the concerned statutory authorities, has credentials to make any change in the (voter) database.”

Sandhu’s challenge to DG(IT): Commissioner Sandhu pressed further, recording in writing that field officers were denied full access by DG(IT) Seema Khanna. Sandhu wrote that field powers were “curtailed by centralised control of ERONet at DG(IT) level”, adding bluntly that the IT division “doesn’t have any legal authority to restrict proper and complete access and freedom to operate, as given by law.”

The official rebuttal: In its Sept. 23 note, the Commission countered that decisions were unanimous and access is strictly role-based. But role definitions in code mean little if an administrator can disable those roles with a single toggle. The operational question remains: who controls the switch, and who inspects the log?

Maharashtra’s successful resistance: On Sept. 24, Maharashtra Chief Electoral Officer S. Chockalingam pushed back in writing against ECINet software restrictions that stripped local EROs of statutory discretion. The Commission retreated, removing the mandatory SIR upload and widening document categories. That tactical concession resolved the grievance in Mumbai, but proved conclusively that centralized software curbs were real.

The law puts the roll in the hands of the ERO. The code puts the switch in the hands of the centre.

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A state pulls 806 logins

On Oct. 31, Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa directed every district election officer in the state to switch off the ECINet login IDs held by computer assistants in the offices of Electoral Registration Officers. The count is 806, 2 operators per Assembly constituency. The official statement gave the reason in 1 line: complaints and information from Pilibhit district about the misuse of those logins.

What the misuse looked like. Opposition parties, including the Congress, alleged that the details of 13,150 registered voters were altered on the rolls in the Pilibhit Sadar Assembly seat. In Azamgarh, an election official said an investigation found 10 different voters entered under a single name, Vikas Yadav, across 5 polling booths. The outsourcing agency was told to terminate the services of the computer assistant attached to Assembly constituency 127-Pilibhit. EROs must confirm each deactivation. DEOs must personally verify compliance in every Assembly constituency and file an action-taken report.

The order also answers the audit’s second question. The CEO’s instructions put the entire responsibility for coordination, supervision, monitoring and quality control of the voter list on the district election officer. DEOs must log in to ECINet themselves, every day, and review every voter-list case. The profiles of deputy district election officers, EROs, assistant EROs, BLO supervisors and booth-level officers must be checked for accurate names, mobile numbers, designations and photographs. Their last-login records must be reviewed daily. Forms 6, 6A, 7 and 8 must be reviewed for pendency and unusual delay. No officer is to share a user ID, a password or an OTP with anyone. BLOs must resolve voter grievances within 48 hours. Laxity in supervision is now a named, punishable failure.

The allegation underneath the order. On Oct. 30, Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav alleged that poll officials were handing their login IDs to BJP workers so those workers could modify voter lists. No agency has published a finding on that allegation, and it is not proven. The state’s answer, delivered the next day, was to withdraw credentials at scale rather than to publish a log.

This is not the central switch. The Charchagram audit describes a control that cuts a state’s designated officer off from the application, or turns a state’s enumeration tile off, from Delhi. Uttar Pradesh did the opposite. It cut access downward, to individual operator logins, using the same portal. The distinction matters and this story does not blur it.

What the 2 episodes share is the missing page. A central administrator can disable a state. A state officer can disable 806 logins. Neither action produced a public record. Uttar Pradesh’s own remedy is what the audit asked the Commission for: 1 credential per official, named responsibility for every entry, and a daily check on who used it. The state published an order. The Commission has published no log.

By the numbers (Uttar Pradesh, Oct. 31, 2026):

• 806 ECINet login IDs ordered switched off across the state
• 13,150 voter records alleged altered in 1 Assembly seat, by the opposition; unproven
• 10 voters entered under 1 name in Azamgarh, per an election official
• 0 credential-misuse findings published by any agency

A login is not a vote. A shared login is how a name disappears without anyone having to flip a switch.

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The deletion form, filed in bulk

ECINet is not the only door into the roll. Form 7 is the objection any citizen can file against another citizen’s entry. On Oct. 30, before a Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court that Form 7 applications had been filed in bulk during the Uttar Pradesh SIR, that they were false, and that none had been accepted. Senior advocate Dama Seshadri Naidu, appearing for the Commission, said authorities had rejected forms filed in violation of norms and that corrective measures were taken promptly on discovery.

The petition came from Barabanki MP Tanuj Punia, represented by senior advocate Salman Khurshid and advocate Shariq Ahmed. Ahmed disputed the claim that the false forms were stopped at the gate and said the court must subject it to judicial scrutiny. Of the 32 Form 7s filed in the Hata Assembly constituency, he submitted, 2 were signed by the booth-level officer, and all of them sought the deletion of voters belonging to 1 community. That is a counsel’s submission, not a finding.

The court did not rule on the merits. It asked Ahmed to file a note with district-wise details of unresolved irregularities within a week, and told the Commission to look into the issues, take necessary action, and file a compliance report. Ahmed argued that the absence of corrective steps in Uttar Pradesh is what emboldened bulk filing in Karnataka and Telangana, where courts have directed first information reports and no such action followed in Uttar Pradesh.

The numbers behind the fight are the Commission’s own. Uttar Pradesh’s SIR ended in April with a reported 84 lakh increase in the electorate, to 13.39 crore, and more than 2 crore voters removed during the revision. The state goes to Assembly elections, and the petition’s lawyers told the court the process may begin as early as December 2026 or January 2027.

The booth agents in Mustafabad. The Hindu reported on Oct. 30 that Form 7 applications seeking deletions were filed on Oct. 28 against 28 voters in the Dayalpur neighbourhood of northeast Delhi’s Mustafabad, naming “absent/permanently shifted” or “death” as the ground. The filer in those cases was Chandra Shekhar Nainwal, a BJP-appointed booth-level agent, according to the Election Commission’s own records. Every elector named was Muslim. The Hindu found that BJP booth agents filed nearly 68 percent of the Form 7s seeking deletions as objector in Mustafabad, and that at one polling booth all 28 voters named in the objections were living at home. The BJP has not commented on that finding. Delhi’s roll is the roll the Commission has been re-verifying for 176 days.

The panchayat parallel. The Allahabad High Court separately asked the Uttar Pradesh State Election Commission to explain why 32 people were dropped from a panchayat roll in a village in Balrampur while people who do not live there were added. A bench of Justices Alok Mathur and Abdesh Kumar Chaudhary listed the matter for Dec. 15. Weeks earlier the same court sought an explanation for 138 residents of Amethi district who appeared in the draft panchayat roll and vanished from the final one. Panchayat rolls run on a different system. The deletion pattern does not.

The ruling party’s own complaint. On Oct. 31, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath claimed that 1.27 crore Hindus were missing from the state’s electoral rolls, and said Uttar Pradesh should have more than 16 crore electors instead of about 13 crore. He told BJP workers to coordinate with booth-level officers and run a campaign to get eligible voters included. That figure is a Chief Minister’s claim at a party meeting, not an audited count, and no independent verification exists. It also cuts both ways. The state that runs the machinery now says the roll is short of the voters its own party wants on it.

The bulk Form 7 fight and the Mustafabad forms sit outside the audit’s frame. Nobody needed an ECINet password to try to delete a voter. The switch controls who can change the roll. The form controls who can ask, and no register of those askers has been published either.

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The West Bengal exception

West Bengal is the frontline battleground where India’s voter revision controversy is fought. While the ruling party alleges illegal infiltrators, the opposition charges deliberate disenfranchisement of minority voters.

The audit discovered a programmatic restriction that applies exclusively to West Bengal’s registration machinery. No other state or Union Territory in the republic contains a parallel exclusion in the client bundle.

By the numbers (The Bengal battleground):

• 9.08 million names deleted in the Bengal SIR, about 12 percent of the electorate
• 2.71 million removed after adjudication as “logical discrepancies”
• 3.83 million appeals filed before SIR tribunals; 3.71 million still pending
• 1 state isolated by name inside production JavaScript

The human impact: The numbers have layers, and each layer is worse than the last. About 90.8 lakh names were deleted in the Bengal SIR, roughly 12 percent of the state’s 76 million electors. Of those, 27.16 lakh were removed after adjudication as “logical discrepancies”, the figure that became the public shorthand for the purge. Excluded voters filed 22.21 lakh appeals, part of a tribunal load of 38.31 lakh appeals covering both inclusions and exclusions. By Oct. 9, 37.05 lakh of those appeals were still pending before 19 appellate tribunals, and only about 1.26 lakh had been decided. Of the decided cases, 93 percent went in favour of the voter, the Commission told the Supreme Court. The Commission has asked for 42 more tribunals.

Trinamool MP Abhishek Banerjee warned in February that EROs were locked out of supervising AEROs on ECINet. Supreme Court advocate Harshit Anand pointed out that enforcing such regional curbs violates direct judicial mandates on voter roll accessibility.

Capability versus use: The audit proves that the conditional logic targets West Bengal by name. It cannot prove whether backend servers activated the exclusion during live operations.

The timeline overlap: The restriction sat in production code from at least Sept. 28 through Oct. 19. That window followed the public disclosure of the 2 commissioners’ dissents and the announcement of an internal review committee.

The displaced workflow: When statutory field officers cannot view voter documents or the notice-and-hearing dashboard, their legal responsibilities do not vanish. The verification work is redirected to someone else in the hierarchy. The unanswered question is who.

A rule that names 1 state is not a technical default. It is a policy choice.

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The Commission’s own dissent

The most devastating evidence in this investigation does not come from reverse-engineering code. It comes from within the Election Commission itself.

2 of the 3 election commissioners put their dissent in writing at least 14 times over 10 months. They objected to Form 6 modifications, centralized database access, and unsupervised powers wielded by the IT division. They wrote to the Cabinet Secretary and requested external audits, but were systematically overruled.

The Commission’s formal response: Nirvachan Sadan issued two defensive press releases in late September:

• Sept. 23 (ECI/PN/119/2026): Maintained that all decisions were unanimous, internal notes are routine administrative discourse, and field officers retain statutory autonomy.
• Sept. 26 (ECI/PN/120/2026): Announced a review committee headed by the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner and an IIT/IIIT academic to inspect the portal.

The release omitted any commitment to make that audit report public.

The Commission claims consensus. The written record documents dissent. The public is left without minutes to judge the contradiction.

The Commission’s public position	What is not public
Access is role-based and tied to statutory powers.	The access matrix, and who can change it.
The SIR and other decisions were unanimous.	The minutes, and the written record behind the 14 objections.
The work-redistribution orders were never implemented.	The switch log.
An independent audit was ordered.	The audit’s findings.
The portal is secure.	The VIP criteria, and whether the tag was used.

The table is not a claim that the Commission is lying. It is a list of claims the public cannot check.

The opposition offensive: The Congress seized on the audit to launch fierce political attacks, demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. General Secretary Jairam Ramesh accused the Commission of deceit, alleging the architecture aimed to centralize voter roll manipulation from ruling party headquarters.

Ramesh’s escalation: On Oct. 22, Ramesh asserted that “vote chori is a proven reality” threatening 10 crore voters. That political claim runs well ahead of the facts: the Charchagram audit documents software capability, not active vote manipulation.

The unaddressed CERT-In alerts: The controversy gained technical weight when security researchers confirmed alerting both the ECI and CERT-In in July regarding vulnerabilities across the portal and backend APIs.

The transparency deficit: The Commission instituted an internal audit after dissent leaked into the press. Yet it continues to suppress the audit findings, the toggle logs, the access matrix, and the VIP tag criteria.

A commission that cannot agree on its own software cannot ask the public to trust it.

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What the Commission will not say

On Oct. 16, 2026, the Election Commission answered a Right to Information request from Mujeeb Ayyub. He had asked for the name and version of the software used to identify errors and anomalies in the electoral roll during the SIR. The Commission refused. It cited the exemption for trade secrets and intellectual property under Section 8(1)(d) of the RTI Act. It added that “no new software has been developed or procured for the SIR exercise.”

That answer creates a puzzle. If no new software was procured, the adjudication ran on existing systems. The public still does not know which systems, who wrote them, or how they decide that a voter is a duplicate, a shifted resident or a logical discrepancy. The ECINet audit found a VIP tag and a West Bengal exception in one front end. The RTI answer says the back end is none of the public’s business.

Jairam Ramesh, the Congress general secretary, treated the refusal as confirmation of a pattern. “The lack of transparency around the ECINET software and the use of AI has damaged the credibility of the entire process among citizens,” he said. The Commission has not published the software name, the version, the audit committee’s report or the criteria for the VIP tag.

The asymmetry is the point. The Commission publishes what the software did, in lakhs of deleted names. It will not publish the software. A citizen can be removed by a program the state will not name.

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The Court asks the obvious question

On Oct. 28, the Supreme Court heard petitions on the Delhi SIR. The bench was Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana. Advocate Prashant Bhushan argued for the petitioners. More than 43 lakh voters had been excluded from Delhi’s draft roll, most of them tagged as “permanently shifted” or “absent”.

The court’s central question was simple. Under the SIR rules, a voter deleted from the roll had to file Form 6, the form meant for a first-time registrant, to get back on. The Chief Justice asked why the burden sat with the voter. “Instead of burdening them to approach you, why don’t you reach out to them?” he said. He suggested the Commission publish a list of the 43 lakh excluded people so they could be traced.

The bench also rejected the ground itself. A brief work trip cannot be treated as a permanent change of residence, the court said. “It cannot delete names of migrant workers, street vendors, daily wagers on that ground,” the bench said. Justice Bagchi asked whether a voter who was away for a season should “forever lose your right”.

The Commission defended the process. It told the court that many of the excluded had permanently shifted, that 93 percent of the appeals decided so far in West Bengal had gone in the voter’s favour, and that the deletions were lawful. The 93 percent figure is an argument about restoration, not about the original deletion. On the legality of “logical discrepancy”, the category used to strike voters whose addresses did not match, Justice Bagchi said the court had not ruled.

What the court did do was remove the Oct. 30 deadline for additions to Delhi’s roll and order the Commission to keep adding names. It asked for a progress report in 2 weeks. Outside court, activists said an RTI reply had turned up no record of the 2025 decisions the Commission’s affidavit describes as unanimous.

The hearing produced no ruling on the switch. It produced something more useful: a constitutional court asking why the state makes the citizen prove she exists.

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The roll is still being rebuilt

On Oct. 29, the Commission extended the SIR timetable in 5 states and Delhi. The final Delhi roll moves from Oct. 30 to Dec. 22, with claims and objections accepted to Nov. 25. Maharashtra’s final roll moves to Nov. 30, with claims to Nov. 13. Haryana and Andhra Pradesh will dispose of claims by Nov. 20, Telangana by Nov. 26 and Nagaland by Nov. 25. The Commission said the chief electoral officers had asked for more time.

The extensions are administrative. They are also an admission. The SIR was sold as a cleanup that could be finished on schedule. It is now running past the Delhi deadline the Supreme Court refused to enforce, and the tribunal backlog in Bengal is years deep. The Commission wants 42 more tribunals. The roll will be rebuilt before the audit committee reports, if it reports at all.

The Supreme Court heard the Delhi case again on Oct. 30. It did not order an extension of the SIR. It said none was needed, because enrolment is “a continuous process”. On Oct. 31 it clarified that completion of the SIR does not freeze the roll: deletions and additions continue. The distinction matters. The final roll moved to Dec. 22 by the Commission’s own letter on Oct. 29, not by a court order. The court’s contribution was to say the state may keep working. That is not a safeguard. It is a permission slip.

Delhi’s next job is to find the people it removed. The chief electoral officer says 47.56 lakh deleted voters will be re-verified door to door, with special camps on Nov. 15 and Nov. 22 for students, homeless people, transgender persons and sex workers. The same electorate was told to prove it existed; now the state will come and check. The burden has moved, but only after the deletions, the protests and the court.

In Bengal, the arithmetic is worse. The Hindu reported on Oct. 30 that election officials filed 16,10,311 appeals against voters a tribunal had restored. Of the 38,31,429 appeals before the tribunals, 22,21,118 came from deleted voters and 16,10,311 from the Commission’s own officers. 37.05 lakh were still pending. The new question is not whether the appeals are many. It is whether the officers who filed them had the statutory authority to appeal in the Commission’s name. The Commission cites Supreme Court orders of Apr. 1 and Apr. 6. The court has not settled the authority question.

Kolkata shows what the numbers mean at street level. The state Congress says 1.2 lakh electors are missing from the Kolkata Municipal Corporation roll and 39,000 from Howrah before the civic polls. A SABAR Institute analysis reported by The Telegraph put the Calcutta deletion at 10,50,905 names, about 25 percent of the original electorate. The figures are contested. The trend is not.

On Oct. 31, the INDIA bloc carried out the “public impeachment” it had announced, in the garden of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence at 10, Rajaji Marg, after rain pushed the Ramlila Maidan event back a day. The proceedings ran 3 hours and 30 minutes and copied the Lok Sabha, down to a structure modelled on the old Parliament building, with former Speaker Meira Kumar in the chair and Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi in the front row. The bloc adopted a motion by a show of hands and put 6 charges to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar: conspiring with the BJP to steal elections, deleting 13.2 crore voters through the SIR, changing Form 6 without Parliament, centralising the rolls through ERONet and ECINet, shutting out the other 2 Election Commissioners, and acting at the direction of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. Kharge said 193 Opposition MPs had given notices in both Houses 7 months ago seeking his removal and had been rejected.

Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi called the gathering “a political weapon”. He alleged 13.3 crore deletions, about 15 percent of the electorate, which he said is 1 voter in every 7, against the 3 percentage point difference between the Opposition and the winning side in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, and said, “You cannot delete 13.3 crore votes and argue that the 2024 elections were legal.” He said Kumar should be removed and tried for treason, and told Commission officials they are the first target: “you are their instruments, and so you are our first target”. TMC MP Mahua Moitra claimed 71 percent of the deleted voters in West Bengal are Muslims and 51 percent are women. Those are Opposition claims. They run ahead of the audited record, and Human Rights Watch’s finding that the deletions fell disproportionately on women, Muslims and marginalised communities is a qualitative assessment, not a constituency count.

A public meeting is not an impeachment. It is a message. The message is that the Opposition no longer believes the Commission can audit itself. After 130 million deletions, a withheld software name and 16.1 lakh official appeals, that belief is not hysteria. It is the reasonable reading of the record. What is not reasonable is the deletion figure the Opposition quotes, which it has not published a method for.

The ruling party’s answer. On Oct. 31, BJP MP Sambit Patra held a press conference and said the SIR had been conducted 10 times under Congress-led governments. He put the national deletions at nothing sinister: about 12 crore voters had permanently shifted, of whom about 6 crore had already filed Form 6; about 2.8 crore names went off the roll on proof of death, and nearly 1 crore duplicates were removed. “The reality is that not a single person’s vote has been stolen,” he said. He denied that Form 6 was amended, saying only a declaration was added and that a Supreme Court judgment dated May 27, 2026 settled the question. On this story’s central fact, he said there was no disagreement about ECINet. 2 of the 3 Election Commissioners recorded at least 14 written objections to ECINet access and centralization over 10 months, and the Commission’s own Sept. 23 press note answered those objections rather than denying they existed. Patra also said the Congress’s 38 lakh booth agents, if they had worked properly, would have made a mock Parliament unnecessary.

The street, on Nov. 1. The march the bloc had announced for Ramlila Maidan took place. Leaders including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee travelled in an open bus from Kharge’s residence to the ground. Rahul Gandhi said he harboured no personal enmity toward Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah or Gyanesh Kumar, that the bloc would defend the Constitution through “love, not hatred”, and that Kumar “will go to jail”. Kharge attacked the Prime Minister directly. The Congress called the turnout massive and published no count; Gandhi had said on the way in that “hundreds of thousands” would arrive. No independent number exists, and this page does not treat a party’s own claim about its own crowd as a fact. What is a fact is that the demand the bloc carried, the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner, is not something any Commission order or court ruling has moved in the same direction.

The Home Minister’s answer, on Nov. 2. Shah, speaking in Hyderabad on the BJP’s “Save Democracy, Remove Anarchy” padayatra, called the roughly 3 crore names dropped in the revision “infiltrators” and said “they never existed”. He dismissed the Nov. 1 gathering as a “save infiltrator” rally, said Rahul Gandhi’s claim that 13 crore people lost their vote was “lying”, and put 6.15 crore of that 13 crore at people who had simply moved. He dared the Opposition to a debate, said the government was ready to convene a special session of Parliament on the SIR, “infiltrators and EVMs”, and asked how the Congress had formed governments in states including Telangana if the EVMs were bad. Shah is the minister whose portfolio includes the Commission’s superintendence, and he is arguing about the arithmetic of a roll his own machinery revised. The “3 crore infiltrators” figure is his assertion at a rally. No tribunal finding, no first information report and no published adjudication quoted in this story supports it, and the Commission has released no data that could test it.

The citizens’ audit. In Secunderabad Cantonment, the Telangana Voter Rights Forum ran a social audit and public hearing at St. Joseph’s High School on Oct. 31 and tracked down 23 percent of the voters deleted in the constituency since the draft roll of Aug. 17. Surekha Joshi of Trimulgherry kept her vote on none of the six enumeration forms her family submitted together through the booth-level officer; 5 of 6 stayed on the roll. Farzana Begum got a notice mapping her as the sixth sibling of one parent; her husband says she has 4. An armyman who voted in 2024, Joseph, found his name marked Absent/Untraceable. Their forms were filed. Their names were deleted. That is the burden-of-existence design, seen from a school hall in Hyderabad.

The calendar tells its own story. Delhi’s SIR has run 176 days. Andhra Pradesh’s has run 169, Uttar Pradesh’s 158 and Maharashtra’s 154. Bihar finished in 98. The Commission says the workload explains the difference. The Commission has not published the workload.

Human Rights Watch put the national figure at more than 130 million names removed, in a report released on Oct. 28. It said the deletions fell disproportionately on women, Muslims and marginalised communities. It described the SIR as opaque and arbitrary, and the ECINet software as opaque and malfunctioning. It noted that about 93 percent of appealed voters in West Bengal had been restored, and treated that as evidence that the original deletions were wrong. “Indian authorities first stripped millions of citizens … and are now beating and jailing them,” said Elaine Pearson, the group’s Asia director. The group called for the SIR to be scrapped, the crackdown on protesters to end, deleted voters’ rights to be restored, and political interference to be independently investigated.

A roll that removes 130 million names and cannot name the software that did it is not a cleanup. It is a transfer of power over who counts.

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What the finished rolls show

The Commission has now published, through its own notifications and the state chief electoral officers, what the revision did to the 5 states that have finished it. On Nov. 2, an analysis of that data was carried by the Deccan Chronicle and Rediff. Across Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Punjab and Manipur the electorate went from about 18.71 crore before the SIR to about 16.43 crore in the final rolls. That is a net reduction of about 2.29 crore, or roughly 12.2 percent. Uttar Pradesh accounts for nearly 90 percent of the drop.

State	SIR phase	Pre-SIR	Draft roll	Final roll	Net loss	Net per cent	Draft deletions restored
Uttar Pradesh	II	15.44 crore	12.56 crore	13.40 crore	2.04 crore	13.24	about 0.84 crore of 2.89 crore, 29 per cent
Punjab	III	2.15 crore	1.94 crore	2.01 crore	0.14 crore	6.34	about 0.07 crore of 0.21 crore, 34 per cent
Uttarakhand	III	0.80 crore	0.71 crore	0.72 crore	0.08 crore	10.07	about 0.0025 crore, 3 per cent
Manipur	III	0.209 crore	0.193 crore	0.196 crore	0.013 crore	6.33	about 17 per cent
Goa	II	0.1185 crore	0.1085 crore	0.1058 crore	0.013 crore	10.76	none; the final roll is smaller than the draft
5 states		18.71 crore		16.43 crore	2.29 crore	12.2

The recovery rate is the finding. Punjab got back about 34 percent of what its own draft deleted. Uttar Pradesh got back about 3 percent. Manipur returned 17 percent, Uttarakhand’s neighbour to the north got 3, and Goa returned nothing at all: it is the only one of the 5 whose final roll came in below its draft. One platform, one form set, one statute, one Commission. The gap between the best and the worst recovery is more than 10 times, and no reason for it has been published.

A draft is a first pass. What happens next is invisible. Between the draft roll and the final roll, someone decides which of the deleted names come back. In Uttar Pradesh that decision restored 29 percent of 2.89 crore deletions and left 2.04 crore people off the roll. In Uttarakhand the same stage restored 3 percent. The Commission has published draft rolls and final rolls. It has published no note reconciling the two, no criterion for restoration, and no count of the hearings that produced them. That is the pipeline the audit was about.

These numbers cut across the argument, not along it. Sambit Patra told a press conference on Oct. 31 that the deletions were housekeeping and that “not a single person’s vote has been stolen”. A net shrinkage of 12.2 percent of an electorate in the 5 states that finished is not housekeeping. It is a change in who is on the roll at the scale the Opposition has been claiming: Rahul Gandhi’s figure is 13.3 crore, which he says is about 15 percent of the country’s electors. But the five-state data is not the Opposition’s number either. It measures the net change after restorations in 5 states, not deletions nationwide, and it was built by the Commission and the state offices, not by anyone petitioning the Supreme Court. It is the only figure in this fight that comes from the machinery itself.

It is 5 states, and it is not the country. Delhi’s final roll is due Dec. 22 and the Commission has ordered a special summary revision in 17 states, so the 12.2 percent describes the states that have finished. The states that finished are the ones that vote first. The Commission noted that assembly elections in these 5 could be held “early next year”: the term of the 403-member Uttar Pradesh assembly ends on May 22, 2027, and those of the 60-member Manipur, 40-member Goa, 117-member Punjab and 70-member Uttarakhand assemblies end on different dates in March 2027. Voters who turn 18 on or before Jan. 1 get their chance in the summary revision. About 2.29 crore people in these 5 states will need more than a birthday to get back on.

The state that ran the revision says the roll is short anyway. On Oct. 31, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said 1.27 crore Hindus were missing from the state’s electoral rolls and that the state should have more than 16 crore electors rather than about 13 crore. The Commission’s published final figure for Uttar Pradesh is 13.40 crore. So the ruling party’s own complaint and the Commission’s own ledger agree on one thing: the roll is roughly 13 crore, not 16. They disagree about who is missing from it, and neither has published a list.

By the numbers (5 finished states, Nov. 2, 2026):

• 2.29 crore net voters lost across Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Punjab and Manipur
• 12.2 per cent of a combined electorate of about 18.71 crore
• 13.24 per cent net in Uttar Pradesh, the steepest, and nearly 90 per cent of the total drop
• 34 per cent of Punjab’s draft deletions restored, against 3 per cent in Uttarakhand and 0 net in Goa
• 0 published notes reconciling any draft roll to any final roll

A switch that can cut a state off from the roll is a threat to the process. A roll that loses 2.29 crore names in 5 states and cannot show, state by state, how many came back and why, is already a result.

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What the ECI should publish

The list is modest. The Commission can do 10 things without publishing a vulnerability.

• Publish the software: the name and version of the program that flags roll errors, and the rules it applies.
• Publish the access policy: who can disable whose access, and on what grounds.
• Publish the access matrix: which role can see which screen, and who can change it.
• Publish the switch log: every enable and disable action, with a timestamp and an author.
• Publish the credential register: every login issued on ECINet, to which post, and every one since withdrawn.
• Open the log to the ERO concerned.
• Publish the audit’s findings and method.
• Publish the minutes of the 3 commissioners.
• Put any change that limits a statutory officer’s powers before all 3 commissioners.
• Publish the VIP criteria: what the tag means, who can assign it, and who can download the list.

The counterargument is security. Publishing the access rules could help an attacker. That is a real risk. It is also an excuse. The Commission can publish the policy without publishing the credentials. It can publish the log without publishing the vulnerability. It can publish the audit’s findings without publishing the exploit. The choice is not between security and transparency. It is between a rule that can be checked and a rule that cannot.

The 2029 general election is the deadline. The roll will be used. The platform will be used. The question is whether the rules are public before then. The Commission has 3 years to answer. It should not need a leak to do it.

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What to watch

• The audit committee’s report. The Commission announced the committee on Sept. 26 and constituted it on Oct. 14. It has not published a report or said whether it will.
• The RTI appeal. The Commission refused to name the SIR software on Oct. 16. The refusal can be appealed.
• The switch log. A log would show whether any state’s access was cut, when, and on whose order.
• The West Bengal explanation. The Commission has not said why 1 state is different.
• The VIP list. The code can mark voters and download their names. The Commission has not said what the tag means.
• The 806 deactivated logins. Uttar Pradesh ordered EROs to confirm each switch-off and DEOs to file action-taken reports. No report has been published, and the Commission has said nothing about credential sharing on a portal it runs.
• The Form 7 compliance report. On Oct. 30 the Supreme Court told the Commission to examine the bulk deletion applications filed in Uttar Pradesh and report back, and asked the petitioners for a district-wise note within a week. Whether a single filer is ever named is the test.
• The Delhi roll. The Supreme Court removed the Oct. 30 deadline for additions. The Commission set the final roll for Dec. 22, and the court declined to order a formal extension of the SIR while setting a progress report for mid-November. The state will re-verify 47.56 lakh deleted voters door to door, with special camps on Nov. 15 and Nov. 22.
• The Bengal authority question. Election officials filed 16.1 lakh appeals against restored voters. The Commission says its officers had the power. The court has not ruled. 37.05 lakh appeals were still pending.
• The draft-to-final reconciliation. The Commission has published pre-SIR, draft and final figures for Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Punjab and Manipur, and nothing that explains the gap between them. Why 34 percent of Punjab’s deletions came back and 3 percent of Uttarakhand’s is answerable with a hearing log. Nobody has asked the Commission for it in court.
• The special session. On Nov. 2 the Home Minister said the government is ready to convene a special session of Parliament on the SIR, “infiltrators and EVMs”, and dared the Opposition to a debate. A sitting of the House would put the Commission’s data on a privileged platform and force numbers into a record. Watch whether the offer becomes a notice.
• The street. The INDIA bloc tried the Chief Election Commissioner on 6 charges in a garden at 10, Rajaji Marg on Oct. 31 and held its Ramlila Maidan march on Nov. 1, with no crowd count published by anyone but the Congress. It is politics, not procedure. It still tells you what the Opposition thinks of the Commission’s ability to audit itself.
• The 2029 roll. The platform will be used. The rules should be public before then.

A democracy can survive a bad roll. It cannot survive a roll no one can audit.

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Said plainly: The switch is real. The trust is not.

The institutional stonewall: The Election Commission built a central kill switch and refuses to publish the operating rules. It insists access is role-based. The code shows those roles can be overridden centrally from Delhi. It built a VIP voter tag and concealed the criteria. It announced an internal audit committee and has not published its findings. It refused an RTI request for the name of the software that flagged the roll errors, citing trade secrets. The burden of proof rests on Nirvachan Sadan. Nirvachan Sadan is stonewalling.

The audit’s integrity: Charchagram’s strength is its restraint. It never claims the switch was flipped. It proves the capability sits in production JavaScript. That is enough to demand an immutable log. In a republic built on one citizen, one vote, a secret tier called “VIP” is not a technical feature. It is a hierarchy.

The dissents: Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi recorded 14 written objections. Good. Then they stayed in their posts and joined the photo-ops while the system rolled out. Their objections destroyed the facade of consensus. They did not stop the code. A dissent that changes nothing but the minutes is a receipt, not a rebellion.

The Court’s question: The Supreme Court asked why a voter deleted from the roll must file a first-time registration form to get back on, and why the state cannot reach out to the 43 lakh people it removed in Delhi. That question exposed the design: the burden of existence sits with the citizen. Then, on Oct. 30, the court declined to order an extension because enrolment is “a continuous process”. The roll stayed open because the Commission wrote a letter, not because the court ordered it. The court’s phrase is not oversight. It is a shrug with a gavel.

The state machines: State election departments carry a heavy share of the complicity. Until Maharashtra’s CEO formally protested, state administrations conceded statutory authority to Delhi’s IT division. West Bengal’s officers went further: they filed 16.1 lakh appeals against voters a tribunal had restored, in the Commission’s name, without settling whether they had the authority to do it. Uttar Pradesh then switched off 806 ECINet logins in a day, after an opposition leader alleged that officials were handing credentials to party workers. The order is real reform and an admission in the same paragraph: the state found the access control loose enough to need a purge, and it published an instruction instead of a log. Complicity has 3 flavours here. Silence, signatures, and cleanup nobody can audit.

The state’s own fix: Read Uttar Pradesh’s Oct. 31 order against this story’s demands. One credential per post. No shared user ID, password or OTP. Daily review of who logged in and what is pending. Named accountability for every entry. That is the access policy this page has asked Nirvachan Sadan to publish, written by a state officer in 1 day, for 1 state, using powers the Commission never said it had restricted. If a state can impose it on ECINet logins, the Commission can publish the rules that govern them.

The BJP’s arithmetic: Sambit Patra gave the nationwide tally the ruling party has offered: 12 crore permanently shifted, 6 crore of them back on Form 6, 2.8 crore deleted on death, nearly 1 crore duplicates. It was spoken at a press conference. It is not in an affidavit, an RTI reply or a published report, and the Commission has not released data that would let anyone check it. On Nov. 2 the Home Minister went further and put a label on 3 crore of the deleted names: “infiltrators” who “never existed”, spoken at a rally in Hyderabad, with no adjudication cited and no list produced. A man who never existed cannot be appealed for, and that is the convenience of the claim. Patra’s larger assertion, that there was no disagreement about ECINet, is contradicted by 14 written objections from 2 Election Commissioners and by the Commission’s own Sept. 23 press note, which answered those objections instead of denying them.

The ledger the Commission itself wrote: The 5 finished states are the only place in this fight where the ruling party, the Opposition and the Commission are working from the same numbers, because the numbers are the Commission’s. They say 2.29 crore fewer voters, 12.2 percent of 18.71 crore, with 29 percent of Uttar Pradesh’s draft deletions restored, 34 percent of Punjab’s, 17 percent of Manipur’s, 3 percent of Uttarakhand’s and none of Goa’s. That record damages both political stories. It is far too large for a housekeeping claim and it is not the Opposition’s national 13.3 crore, because it already counts the restorations the Opposition ignores. It also indicts the machinery: an election authority that can produce a final roll cannot produce the reason 1 state’s deleted voters came back at 11 times the rate of its neighbour’s. Publish the reconciliation and one of the two political claims dies. Until then, every number on this file is a position, not a proof, and the only institution that could settle it has declined to.

The opposition overreach: The Congress is exploiting technical findings for unverified partisan accusations. Jairam Ramesh saying vote theft is a proven reality runs well ahead of the evidence. The party’s Oct. 29 claim that the SIR is a “conspiracy” designed by the Prime Minister and the Home Minister is a political charge, not a finding. On Oct. 31 the bloc’s own charges said 13.2 crore voters were deleted and its Leader of the Opposition said 13.3 crore, in the same evening, without publishing how either number was built. Claiming the 2024 election was therefore illegal is the most extreme sentence any Opposition leader has put on this file, and it rests on a count no one has audited. Demanding the CEC’s removal without server logs is theatre. If the Opposition has backend proof, publish it. Otherwise, stick to the code.

The burden: The citizen must prove she exists, file Form 6, appeal, wait for a tribunal, and now submit to a door-to-door re-verification. The state deletes 130 million names and calls the roll “continuous”. That is not a cleanup. It is a machine that makes people apply to be counted. And a stranger with a booth agent’s signature can start the process: Form 7 needs no ECINet password at all.

The bottom line on code: Independent audits work. The front end was transparent enough to reveal the architecture. Maharashtra’s pushback proves software can be rolled back when power is challenged. The enduring scandal is that it takes leaks, dissents and independent investigations to make a constitutional body obey its own statute.

A democracy can survive a bad roll. It cannot survive a roll no one can audit.

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What has happened since January

• Jan. 22, 2026: The ECI launches ECINet at the IICDEM in Delhi.
• May 29, 2026: Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi proposes an outside audit of the roll database and access controls.
• Sept. 23, 2026: The Indian Express reports at least 14 objections in 10 months. The ECI press note (ECI/PN/119/2026) says the SIR and other decisions were unanimous; internal notes are standard; ECINet operates under data-security protocols.
• Sept. 26, 2026: The ECI announces a committee led by the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner, with an IIT/IIIT expert, to review ECINet. The note does not say whether the report will be public.
• Sept. 28, 2026: The West Bengal-only restriction is present in the code from at least this date.
• Sept. 29, 2026: The ECI removes the additional SIR declaration from Form 6 in states where the SIR has concluded.
• Oct. 2, 2026: Charchagram begins examining the public front-end code.
• Oct. 9, 2026: The Hindu reports 38.31 lakh Bengal SIR appeals, 37.05 lakh still pending before 19 tribunals, and 93 percent of decided cases in the voter’s favour; 27.1 lakh were removed after adjudication.
• Oct. 14, 2026: The Commission constitutes the ECINet review committee it announced on Sept. 26.
• Oct. 16, 2026: The current build is introduced. The Commission refuses an RTI request for the name and version of the SIR adjudication software, citing trade secrets.
• Oct. 19, 2026: The code still contains the West Bengal-only restriction. The ECI does not respond to Hindustan Times.
• Oct. 20, 2026: The Hindu and Hindustan Times report the audit. The Commission has not published the access policy.
• Oct. 21, 2026: The Wire reports the VIP voter tag and the downloadable list.
• Oct. 22, 2026: Jairam Ramesh says “vote chori is a proven reality”; the Congress claims more than 10 crore voters are at risk.
• Oct. 23, 2026: People Against SIR marches toward Nirvachan Sadan; Delhi Police enforce Section 163 of the BNSS; the Commission stays silent behind barricades.
• Oct. 24, 2026: Hindustan Times reports the RTI refusal. The Commission says no new software was procured for the SIR.
• Oct. 25, 2026: The Congress says the Commission is hiding ECINet information to mask “massive, centralised manipulation”.
• Oct. 27, 2026: The Commission files an affidavit in the Supreme Court defending the SIR; the Congress calls it “deceitful and duplicitous”.
• Oct. 28, 2026: The Supreme Court hears the Delhi SIR petitions, asks why deleted voters must file Form 6, and removes the Oct. 30 deadline for additions. Human Rights Watch puts the national deletion at more than 130 million.
• Oct. 29, 2026: The Commission extends SIR deadlines, with Delhi’s final roll now due Dec. 22 and 5 other states on Nov. 30. The Congress calls the SIR a “conspiracy” and repeats its demand for the CEC’s resignation.
• Oct. 30, 2026: The Supreme Court declines to order a formal extension, with the Chief Justice saying enrolment is “a continuous process”. Delhi’s chief electoral officer announces door-to-door re-verification of 47.56 lakh deleted voters, with special camps on Nov. 15 and Nov. 22. The Hindu reports that election officials filed 16,10,311 appeals against voters restored by Bengal tribunals, and that the officials’ statutory authority to appeal is under question. The state Congress says 1.2 lakh electors are missing from the Kolkata civic roll and 39,000 from Howrah. Before a Bench headed by the Chief Justice, the Commission concedes Form 7 deletion applications were filed in bulk in Uttar Pradesh, calls them false, and says none were accepted; the court asks it to act and file a compliance report. The Hindu reports that BJP booth agents filed Form 7s against 28 Muslim voters in Mustafabad, and nearly 68 percent of the deletion forms naming an objector there.
• Oct. 31, 2026: The Supreme Court clarifies that completion of the SIR does not freeze the roll, and that deletions and additions continue. Uttar Pradesh’s CEO Navdeep Rinwa orders all 806 ECINet login IDs held by computer assistants switched off after the Pilibhit and Azamgarh credential misuse, fixes accountability on district election officers, and bars the sharing of any user ID, password or OTP. The INDIA bloc holds its “public impeachment” of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in the garden at 10, Rajaji Marg, on 6 charges, with Meira Kumar presiding; Rahul Gandhi alleges 13.3 crore deletions and says the 2024 election cannot be called legal. The BJP’s Sambit Patra says not a single vote has been stolen and there is no disagreement over ECINet. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath claims 1.27 crore Hindus are missing from the state’s rolls. A Telangana social audit traces 23 percent of the voters deleted in Secunderabad Cantonment. The bloc confirms its Nov. 1 march from Minto Road to Ramlila Maidan.
• Nov. 1, 2026: The INDIA bloc holds its “Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” march and rally at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi, having travelled in an open bus from Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence. Rahul Gandhi says he bears no personal enmity to the Prime Minister, the Home Minister or the Chief Election Commissioner, that the bloc will defend the Constitution through “love, not hatred”, and that Gyanesh Kumar “will go to jail”. The Congress calls the turnout massive and publishes no count. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma says the protest stages “drama” to help settle infiltrators.
• Nov. 2, 2026: Data made public by the Election Commission and the state chief electoral officers puts the 5 states that have finished the SIR at about 16.43 crore electors against about 18.71 crore before it: 2.29 crore fewer, roughly 12.2 percent, with Uttar Pradesh at 13.24 percent and nearly 90 percent of the total drop. Punjab restores about 34 percent of its draft deletions, Uttar Pradesh about 29 percent, Manipur about 17 percent, Uttarakhand about 3 percent, and Goa’s final roll comes in below its draft. Reporting: Deccan Chronicle and Rediff. On the same day, in Hyderabad, Home Minister Amit Shah calls about 3 crore of the deleted names “infiltrators” who “never existed”, dismisses the Nov. 1 rally as a “save infiltrator” rally, says Rahul Gandhi’s 13 crore figure is “lying”, dares the Opposition to a debate and says the government is ready to convene a special session of Parliament on the SIR, “infiltrators and EVMs”.

Bottom line: The audit found a switch and a VIP tag, not a smoking gun. A week later, a state used the same kind of power in the other direction and pulled 806 logins in a single order, which tells the public what the Commission would not: the credentials were loose enough to need this. The Court has said the roll is a “continuous process” and asked the Commission to report on Form 7s filed in bulk. The Commission still will not name the software, publish the log or explain the tag. Delhi will re-verify 47.56 lakh people it removed. Bengal’s officers filed 16.1 lakh appeals against people a tribunal restored. And on Nov. 2 the Commission’s own data closed the part of the revision that is finished: 2.29 crore fewer voters across 5 states, 12.2 percent, with Punjab restoring 34 percent of its draft deletions and Uttarakhand 3 percent, and no published reason for the difference. A roll that requires the citizen to prove she exists, twice, is not a roll. It is a filter. A filter no one can read is worse.

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Sources

Tap to open the 70 sourcesTap to close

• The Hindu, Oct. 20, 2026 - the central switch; the State Nodal Officer disable action; the state-wise enumeration form toggle; the Charchagram audit by Saurav Rajput.
• Hindustan Times, Oct. 20, 2026 - the West Bengal-only restriction; the code fetched as recently as Oct. 19; the ECI did not respond; the audit could not verify server-side enforcement; the 2.71 million disenfranchised; 3.8 million pending appeals; tribunal complaints; Abhishek Banerjee’s allegation; Harshit Anand’s legal objection.
• FACT, Oct. 20, 2026 - the Bengal-only exclusion; the enumeration form contents; the notice-and-hearing dashboard; the front-end method.
• The Wire, Oct. 21, 2026 - the VIP voter tag; the gold symbol; the downloadable list by assembly constituency; the state, district, constituency and polling-part filters; the criteria are unknown; the audit excerpt says “we used no password and called no API.”
• MediaNama, Oct. 22, 2026 - the open questions: whether the restriction was enabled, for which officers, between which dates, on whose approval; whether access changes are logged; what the VIP marker means, who can assign it, and who can download the list; whether the review committee’s report will be public.
• The Wire, Sept. 29, 2026 - Maharashtra CEO S. Chockalingam’s Sept. 24 letter; the 4 changes; the ERO’s authority.
• Election Commission of India, Sept. 23, 2026 - press note ECI/PN/119/2026: decisions, including the SIR, were unanimous; internal notes and technical suggestions are standard; ECINet operates under data-security protocols; EROs and DEOs act under statutory powers.
• Election Commission of India, Sept. 26, 2026 - press note ECI/PN/120/2026: a committee headed by the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner, with an independent IIT/IIIT expert, will review ECINet and report to the Commission; the note does not say whether the report will be published; future IT modules go through the Committee of Officers; the SIR was completed in 20 states and UTs, including West Bengal.
• The Wire, Sept. 29, 2026 - the ECI removed the additional SIR declaration from Form 6 in states where the SIR has concluded.
• Hindustan Times, Oct. 22, 2026 - the People Against SIR march to the ECI on Oct. 23; no police permission; Section 163 of the BNSS remains in force in New Delhi.
• Indian Express, Sept. 23, 2026 - the 14 objections; Joshi’s May 29 audit proposal; Sandhu’s “curtailed by centralised control” and the DG(IT)’s lack of legal authority.
• Indian Express, Sept. 23, 2026 - the 14 objections; the Form 6 dispute; the access curbs.
• New Indian Express, Sept. 23, 2026 - the ECI says the SIR decisions were unanimous.
• Rediff, Sept. 27, 2026 - the ECI’s response; role-based access; the work-redistribution orders were never implemented.
• New Indian Express, Sept. 27, 2026 - the ECI announced an independent audit of ECINet.
• New Indian Express, Oct. 2, 2026 - the Congress accuses the ECI of “lying”; Jairam Ramesh; the demand for the CEC’s resignation.
• The Hindu, Oct. 8, 2026 - the Congress allegation that ECINet was designed to centralize deletions and additions from the BJP headquarters; the CERT-In warning.
• India Today, Sept. 23, 2026 - the Form 6 changes; the 14 objections; the legal objections.
• Dainik Statesman, Oct. 20, 2026 - the West Bengal-only restriction; the code’s timeline; the lawyers’ Supreme Court objection.
• The Hindu, Sept. 27, 2026 - the 2 commissioners’ profiles; the 14 objections in 10 months.
• The Hindu, Aug. 24, 2026 - CEC Gyanesh Kumar says elections are held transparently under the audit of political parties and candidates.
• Hindustan Times, Sept. 23, 2026 - the ECI rejects the report of internal disquiet; SIR and other decisions unanimous.
• India Today, Sept. 24, 2026 - the commissioners held joint briefings despite internal objections; ECINet launched on Jan. 22.
• The Hindu, Oct. 9, 2026 - 38.31 lakh appeals before the Bengal SIR tribunals; 37.05 lakh still pending; 93 percent of decided cases in the voter’s favour; 19 tribunals; 27.1 lakh removed after adjudication.
• India Today, Sept. 21, 2026 - the 37 lakh backlog; the Commission’s request for 42 more tribunals; the projected 12 years to clear the cases.
• Hindustan Times, Oct. 24, 2026 - the RTI refusal; the exemption for trade secrets; the Oct. 16 response; the Commission says no new software was procured for the SIR.
• The Wire, Oct. 25, 2026 - Mujeeb Ayyub’s RTI; Section 8(1)(d) of the RTI Act; the name and version of the software; the “no new software” line.
• The Hindu, Oct. 25, 2026 - the Congress says the Commission is hiding ECINet information to mask “massive, centralised manipulation”.
• The Hindu, Oct. 27, 2026 - Kharge calls the SIR affidavit “deceitful and duplicitous”; Ramesh calls it “extremely damaging”.
• India Today, Oct. 27, 2026 - the affidavit; SIR orders dated June 24, 2025, Oct. 27, 2025 and May 14, 2026; the unanimity claim; the Congress response.
• ThePrint, Oct. 27, 2026 - the Congress’s 6-point rebuttal; the claim that the affidavit does not deny the revelations.
• SC Observer, Oct. 28, 2026 - the Delhi SIR hearing; the CJI’s Form 6 question; Justice Bagchi says the legality of “logical discrepancy” is undecided.
• New Indian Express, Oct. 28, 2026 - the court says brief work trips cannot mean a permanent change of residence; migrant workers, street vendors and daily wagers cannot be deleted on that ground.
• LawBeat, Oct. 28, 2026 - the 43 lakh “permanently shifted” figure; the court asks whether they “forever lose” the right; the EC to file a report in 2 weeks.
• Times of India, Oct. 28, 2026 - the court removes the Oct. 30 deadline for additions to Delhi’s roll; more than 43 lakh excluded.
• Human Rights Watch, Oct. 28, 2026 - more than 130 million names removed; the disproportionate effect on women, Muslims and marginalised communities; the call to scrap the SIR.
• The Wire, Oct. 28, 2026 - Elaine Pearson’s quote; 93 percent of appealed Bengal voters restored; the demand for an independent inquiry.
• Frontline, Oct. 28, 2026 - Prasenjit Bose on the 90 lakh deletions, the 22 lakh pending appeals and ECINet.
• India TV, Oct. 29, 2026 - Delhi claims to Nov. 25, final roll Dec. 22; Maharashtra claims to Nov. 13, final roll Nov. 30; Haryana and Andhra Pradesh claims disposal Nov. 20; Telangana Nov. 26; Nagaland Nov. 25.
• New Indian Express, Oct. 29, 2026 - the extension follows requests from the chief electoral officers.
• New Indian Express, Oct. 29, 2026 - the Congress calls the SIR a “conspiracy” designed by the Prime Minister and Home Minister; the demand that the CEC resign, the SIR be suspended and ECINet be revamped; the 1,600 foreigners claim.
• India Today, Oct. 29, 2026 - activists flag gaps in the SIR approval records; the RTI reply and the affidavit’s unanimity claim.
• Frontline, Oct. 24, 2026 - the ECINet committee’s mandate; no report published.
• The Hindu, Oct. 30, 2026 - the Supreme Court declines to order a formal extension; the Chief Justice calls enrolment “a continuous process”.
• India.com, Oct. 31, 2026 - the Supreme Court clarifies that deletions and additions continue after the SIR.
• The Hindu, Oct. 30, 2026 - Delhi’s chief electoral officer plans door-to-door re-verification of 47.56 lakh deleted voters, with special camps on Nov. 15 and Nov. 22.
• The Hindu / LiveLaw, Oct. 26-30, 2026 - 16,10,311 appeals filed by election officials against restored voters; 38,31,429 appeals in total; 37.05 lakh pending; the officials’ statutory authority under question.
• The Hindu, Oct. 30, 2026 - the state Congress says 1.2 lakh Kolkata Municipal Corporation electors and 39,000 in Howrah are missing before the civic polls.
• The Hindu, Oct. 30, 2026 - the INDIA bloc’s “public impeachment” of the Chief Election Commissioner is postponed to Oct. 31 because of rain.
• Economic Times, Oct. 31, 2026 - SIR duration: Delhi 176 days, Andhra Pradesh 169, Uttar Pradesh 158, Maharashtra 154, Bihar 98.
• The Hindu, Oct. 31, 2026 - CEO Navdeep Rinwa’s Oct. 31 order deactivating computer assistants’ ECINet logins across the state; the compliance report demanded from EROs; the termination of the assistant in the Pilibhit case; the Congress allegation that 13,150 registered voters’ details were altered in Pilibhit Sadar; the reverification of all forms submitted through computer operators.
• Indian Express, Oct. 31, 2026 - the 806 computer assistants, 2 per Assembly constituency; complaints in Pilibhit and Azamgarh; the portal access first granted because BLOs were untrained on the BLO app; only the BLO to submit booth forms now; EROs keep their own credentials; 10 voters entered under the name Vikas Yadav across 5 booths in Azamgarh; Assembly constituency 127-Pilibhit; DEOs to verify compliance and file action-taken reports.
• Deccan Chronicle, Oct. 31, 2026 - full responsibility for the voter list fixed on the district election officer; daily ECINet login by DEOs; profile verification for DDEOs, EROs, AEROs, BLO supervisors and BLOs; daily last-login review; daily review of Forms 6, 6A, 7 and 8 pendency; the ban on sharing user IDs, passwords and OTPs; the 48-hour BLO grievance rule; Ram Gopal Yadav’s Oct. 30 allegation that officials were giving login IDs to BJP workers.
• The Hindu, Oct. 31, 2026 - the Commission’s Oct. 30 submission before a Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant that false Form 7s were found in the Uttar Pradesh SIR and none accepted; senior advocate Dama Seshadri Naidu for the ECI; Tanuj Punia’s petition, represented by senior advocate Salman Khurshid and advocate Shariq Ahmed; the 32 Form 7s in Hata, 2 signed by the booth-level officer, all against voters of 1 community; the direction to the ECI to act and file a compliance report; Uttar Pradesh’s SIR ending in April with an 84 lakh rise to 13.39 crore and more than 2 crore removed.
• New Indian Express, Oct. 30, 2026 - the Bench directing the petitioners to submit district-wise details of unresolved irregularities within a week.
• Scroll, Oct. 31, 2026 - the ECI advocate’s acknowledgment that Form 7s were filed in bulk and the claim they were false and unactioned; the petitioners’ argument that 32 deletion applications targeted 1 community and that the lack of corrective steps in Uttar Pradesh emboldened bulk filing in Karnataka and Telangana, where courts directed first information reports.
• The Hindu, Oct. 30, 2026 - Chandra Shekhar Nainwal, a BJP-appointed booth-level agent-2, filed Form 7s on Oct. 28 against 28 voters in Dayalpur, Mustafabad, citing absent, permanently shifted or death; every targeted elector was Muslim; BJP booth agents filed nearly 68 percent of the deletion Form 7s naming an objector in Mustafabad; at 1 booth all 28 voters named were living at their addresses; Sajid Hussain, Asad Raza Zaidi and Afsana Khatoon.
• LiveLaw, Oct. 30, 2026 - the Allahabad High Court bench of Justices Alok Mathur and Abdesh Kumar Chaudhary seeking the Uttar Pradesh State Election Commission’s response over 32 names deleted from a Balrampur panchayat roll; the next hearing on Dec. 15.
• The Hindu, Oct. 31, 2026 - the Telangana Voter Rights Forum social audit and Oct. 31 public hearing at St. Joseph’s High School; 23 percent of deleted voters traced in Secunderabad Cantonment; the Aug. 17, 2026 draft roll; Surekha Joshi of Trimulgherry; Farzana Begum’s sixth-sibling notice; Joseph marked Absent/Untraceable; voters told to file Form 6 as new registrants.
• The Hindu, Oct. 31, 2026 - the motion adopted by a show of hands at 10, Rajaji Marg; the 6 charges, including 13.2 crore deletions and acting at the behest of the Prime Minister and Home Minister; 3 hours and 30 minutes of proceedings modelled on the Lok Sabha with former Speaker Meira Kumar presiding; Sonia Gandhi in the front row; Kharge on 193 rejected notices; Rahul Gandhi’s 13.3 crore figure, the 15 percent share, the 3 percentage point margin, the treason demand and the warning to officials.
• The Hindu, Oct. 31, 2026 - the proceedings beginning at the Congress president’s residence on Rajaji Marg; Rahul Gandhi’s claim that the 2024 Lok Sabha election was illegal; the Nov. 1 march from Minto Road to Ramlila Maidan and his description of it; Mahua Moitra’s claim that 71 percent of deleted Bengal voters are Muslims and 51 percent are women; Neha Bora, Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor and Ravi Shankar Prasad; the Cockroach Janta Party’s support for the Nov. 1 rally.
• The Hindu, Oct. 31, 2026 - Sambit Patra’s press conference: “not a single person’s vote has been stolen”; about 12 crore permanently shifted with 6 crore already on Form 6; 2.8 crore deleted on death and nearly 1 crore duplicates; the SIR run 10 times under Congress rule; only a declaration added to Form 6 and a Supreme Court judgment dated May 27, 2026; “no disagreement regarding ECINET”; the 38 lakh Congress booth agents jibe; the Congress and its allies accused of ridiculing democratic institutions.
• NDTV and India Today, Oct. 31, 2026 - Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s claim that 1.27 crore Hindus are missing from Uttar Pradesh’s rolls, his instruction to BJP workers to coordinate with BLOs to get eligible voters included, and the Election Commission figures showing more than 2 crore deletions and 84 lakh additions in the state.
• Deccan Chronicle, Nov. 2, 2026 - PTI analysis of data made public by the Election Commission and state chief electoral officers: the electorate of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Punjab and Manipur fell from about 18.71 crore to about 16.43 crore after the SIR, a net reduction of about 2.29 crore or about 12.2 per cent; Uttar Pradesh carried nearly 90 per cent of the drop, from 15.44 crore pre-SIR to 12.56 crore in the draft and 13.40 crore final, a net 2.04 crore or 13.24 per cent, with about 0.84 crore of roughly 2.89 crore draft deletions restored (about 29 per cent); the five states go to assembly polls early next year.
• Rediff, Nov. 2, 2026 - the per-state detail: Punjab from 2.15 crore to 1.94 crore in the draft and 2.01 crore final, a net 0.14 crore or 6.34 per cent, with about 0.07 crore of roughly 0.21 crore draft deletions restored (about 34 per cent), the strongest recovery; Uttarakhand from 0.80 crore to 0.71 crore and 0.72 crore, a net 0.08 crore or 10.07 per cent, with about 0.0025 crore restored (around 3 per cent); Manipur from 0.209 crore to 0.193 crore and 0.196 crore, a net 0.013 crore or 6.33 per cent, about 17 per cent restored; Goa from 0.1185 crore to 0.1085 crore and 0.1058 crore, a net 0.013 crore or 10.76 per cent, the only one of the five whose final roll is smaller than its draft; the Commission’s note that polls in the five states could be held “early next year”; assembly terms ending May 22, 2027 in Uttar Pradesh (403 members) and on different dates in March 2027 in Manipur (60), Goa (40), Punjab (117) and Uttarakhand (70).
• The Hindu, Nov. 1, 2026 - the INDIA bloc rally at Ramlila Maidan held; Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee travelled in an open bus from Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence; Rahul Gandhi said he bore no personal enmity to Narendra Modi, Amit Shah or Gyanesh Kumar, that the bloc would defend the Constitution through “love, not hatred”, and that Kumar “will go to jail”; the Congress claimed a “massive turnout” and published no count; Rahul Gandhi said “hundreds of thousands” would arrive; Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the protest staged “drama” to facilitate the settlement of infiltrators; Amit Shah said Delhi traders had urged the Congress to postpone the rally until after Diwali.
• India Today, Nov. 1, 2026 - the Nov. 1 “Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” march and rally at Ramlila Maidan; the Congress’s own turnout claim; the demand for the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner.
• Indian Express, Nov. 2, 2026 - at the “Save Democracy, Remove Anarchy” padayatra rally in Hyderabad, Amit Shah called about 3 crore of the names dropped in the SIR “infiltrators” and said “they never existed”; said the BJP would remove “every infiltrator from the electoral rolls”; called Rahul Gandhi’s claim that 13 crore people lost their vote “lying” and put 6.15 crore of them at people who had moved; challenged the Opposition to a debate “from Hyderabad’s soil”; said the government was ready to hold a special session of Parliament on the SIR, infiltrators and EVMs; reported by Nikhila Henry, Nov. 2, 2026 07:42 PM IST.
• The Hindu, Nov. 2, 2026 - Amit Shah dismissed the Nov. 1 rally as a “save infiltrator” rally, said Rahul Gandhi could become Prime Minister “only in mock Parliament”, and asked how the Congress had formed governments in states including Telangana “if the EVMs are bad”.
• Cover image: Newzy.tech illustration, based on the Charchagram audit. The poster shows capability, not use, and is not a live ECINet system.