Electoral Systems
According LiveLaw, a bench of Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia and Justice Joymalya Bagchi heard the submission that voters who fail to submit the forms with the specified documents will face the harsh consequence of being deleted from the electoral roll, even if they have voted in elections for the last 20 years. This, they submitted, will lead to four crores out of eight crores thus exposed.
Supreme Court Agrees to Urgently List Petitions Challenging EC's Bihar Rolls Revision - The Wire
The lawyers added that the ECI’s decision to not accept Aadhaar or voter ID cards made it an ‘impossible’ task to be completed within a very strict timeline.
A day ago, former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa had written in a column that the timing of the announcement “amid the hysteria of citizenship checks, especially at state and municipal levels in some states, where ‘purification’ was equally important and was used for voter deletion, raises questions about the intent of the EC in the face of the huge population thus affected.”
Lavasa asked why the ECI was attaching value to the cut-off date of 2003, when the last roll revisions took place in Bihar.
07/07/2025
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has directed state election officers to destroy CCTV, webcasting and video footage of the election process after 45 days, if the verdict is not challenged in courts within that period, in a bid to curb what it says are “malicious narratives” using its electronic data.
https://thewire.in/government/election-commission-cctv-webcasting-video-footage-destroy-45-days
20/06/2025
In recent years, the election process in India has been converted into one party’s fiefdom. Two sets of methods have been weaponised to subvert the verdict of the people, which are adopted at each stage of the electoral voting system. They are used before voting day, or on the voting day, and after the voting day.
https://thewire.in/government/election-malpractices-india-voter-rolls-evm
Names from voter lists were allegedly deleted ahead of the Delhi elections, as well as Maharashtra state elections. Both occurred in quick succession after the Lok Sabha polls. This is an age-old method which has now been taken to new heights.
The root cause behind the voter registration manipulation is Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which allows for deletion of voter data without notice or an opportunity to be heard by the affected citizen. At the EC’s assurance, the Supreme Court also disposed of a PIL which challenged the constitutional validity of Rule 18.
to insert travelling voters of one party from other states (with duplicate identity cards) to polling booths in a state where elections are taking place, by duplicating Electronic Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers across states. This method was used, allegedly in Maharashtra and Delhi, to general acceptance. I
there is always the possibility of toppling the government already formed by buying out the MLA or MP.
Over the period 2015 to 2024 as many as 10 state governments led by opposition parties were toppled by the ruling party government at the Union. This is done by simply buying the MLAs of the state ruling party, with the goal of making them support the party with the largest financial ability to buy MLAs. The defence of the ruling party is that this method has historically been adopted for a long time.
by Santosh Mehrotra and Jagdeep Chhokar
09/06/2025
The new process will significantly reduce the time lag associated with the earlier manual reporting methods, said a press information bureau (PIB) release on Tuesday (June 3).https://thewire.in/government/under-new-system-presiding-officers-to-enter-voter-turnout-data-every-two-hours-on-polling-day-eci
The new initiative comes after in recent years, questions have been raised on the conduct of the ECI after in some instances, differences have been noticed between votes polled and the voter turnout.
A month after the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Vote For Democracy (VFD), a Maharashtra-based citizens’ platform, had claimed that the difference between approximate votes polled shared by the ECI on polling days at around 8 pm and the final voter turnout is nearly 5 crores.
04/06/2025
Former Delhi High Court Chief Justice A.P. Shah has said in his submission to a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) that the proposed ‘One Nation One Election Bill’ is unconstitutional, violative of democratic principles and the federal structure, according to sources.
Justice Shah, who is a former chairman of the law commission, raised several issues about the bill, including the power given to the Election Commission to recommend postponing state assembly polls.
Shah told the JPC that assembly elections should be held for a full five-year term and was of the opinion that he did not support the view that the simultaneous polls would lead to the saving of large amounts of public money.
18/03/2025