India’s Election Commission is not supposed to function as a one-man institution. It is a three-member constitutional body. Under Section 18 of the 2023 law governing the Commission, its business is to be transacted unanimously “as far as possible”; where the Commissioners differ, the matter is to be decided by majority.
Yet an investigation by The Indian Express raises a far more fundamental question: was the Commission actually functioning as a three-member body when decisions affecting who gets onto – and who remains on – India’s electoral rolls were being taken?
According to the investigation, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally objected at least 14 times over ten months to decisions and orders they said were taken without their knowledge. Their objections covered new-voter registration, deletions and restorations, electoral-roll appeals and the control of the digital infrastructure governing the rolls.
This is not a bureaucratic disagreement over procedure. It goes to the most basic question in a democracy: who gets to vote?
Changes in Form 6: Designed to filter, not to register
The first warning sign was Form 6 – the statutory form used by citizens to register as voters.
As part of the SIR process, the Form 6 began asking new applicants whether their own name, or the name of a parent or grandparent, appeared in the electoral roll prepared during the previous intensive revision in the early 2000s. Although the new section was not formally marked mandatory, applicants could not proceed without answering it.
The significance is not merely administrative.
A young first-time voter could now be asked to establish a connection to an electoral roll prepared roughly two decades earlier – potentially creating an additional hurdle for people whose families have moved, whose records are incomplete, or who have difficulty producing historical documentation.
And there was a more basic legal objection.
In May, Commissioner Vivek Joshi recorded that statutory Form 6 could not be altered without amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. Sandhu agreed. Yet the change was made anyway. On August 13, Sandhu described it as “unauthorised and illegal” and called for its immediate removal.
If two of the three Commissioners believed a statutory form could not lawfully be changed in this manner, how was the change implemented? That is a question about process, not politics.
Centralisation of Electoral rolls.
The second concern is even broader: who controls the machinery through which voter rolls are created and altered?
The ECI’s traditional structure is decentralised. Electoral Registration Officers are statutory authorities responsible for electoral rolls in their constituencies.
But The Indian Express reports that Election Commissioners, Sandhu and Joshi repeatedly raised concerns about the gradual centralisation of access to electoral-roll data and the digital systems through which those rolls are managed. They questioned why the access available to statutory officers on the ground was being restricted, while control was moving upwards into the Commission’s central IT architecture. Once that happens, decentralisation ends. The ERO stops being a decision-maker and becomes a rubber stamp for choices made elsewhere.
That matters because the more consequential decisions are moved away from identifiable officials at the constituency level and into opaque digital systems, the harder it becomes to determine who made a decision, on what basis, and under whose authority.
And that brings us to West Bengal.
West Bengal shows why accountability matters
West Bengal’s SIR did not appear to swing the election: although deletions exceeded victory margins in 49 of 294 seats, those seats split 26 BJP to 21 TMC. But the process faced serious scrutiny. In February 2026, the Supreme Court handed the final stage to judicial officers, who reviewed 60 lakh voters flagged for “logical discrepancies”; the ECI subsequently deleted 27 lakh. The Court then set up tribunals of retired High Court judges to hear appeals.
Last week the Commission told the Court that 38 lakh appeals were pending: 22.21 lakh from deleted voters seeking reinstatement, and 16.10 lakh seeking to have judicially-included voters deleted – with the Commission unable to say who had filed that second batch.
This is exactly what Commissioner Sandhu flagged in August, asking officials who had authorised and actually filed those appeals in the ECI’s name. He noted that neither he, nor Commissioner Joshi, nor West Bengal’s own Chief Electoral Officer had been told the basis or process behind them.
That was precisely the issue Sandhu had raised in August. He asked who had authorised those appeals on behalf of the ECI and who had actually filed them. He recorded that neither he, nor Joshi, nor West Bengal’s Chief Electoral Officer had been informed about their basis or the process by which they were filed.
That raises an extraordinary question: How can an institution entrusted with the electoral roll be unable to explain who initiated proceedings in its own name to delete voters?
The danger of an invisible system
This is where the debate about technology becomes a debate about democratic accountability. A centralised digital system does not have to issue a dramatic public order saying, “Delete these voters” but it performs the same function.
A name can be flagged for a discrepancy. An application can be held up. A notice can fail to reach someone. Documentation can become difficult to produce. An appeal can remain unresolved.
Each individual action may look administrative. The cumulative effect can prevent a citizen from getting enrolled in electoral rolls.
That is why the questions raised by Sandhu and Joshi cannot simply be dismissed as an internal bureaucratic dispute. They concern the machinery through which citizens are added, removed, restored or prevented from entering the electoral rolls.
The ECI must show its work
The public should not have to reconstruct the functioning of a constitutional institution through leaks, anonymous briefings and investigative reporting.
The Commission can settle this. If it maintains that these decisions were properly authorised and that the Commission acted unanimously or by majority wherever there was disagreement, it should publish the relevant record: the objections raised by the two Commissioners; the responses to those objections; the minutes of the relevant meetings; the resolutions or orders by which the disputed decisions were authorised; and the record showing how and when the Commission reached its final position.
From three Commissioners to one.
The most disturbing element of the Indian Express investigation is therefore not any single objection. It is the pattern.
Sandhu and Joshi are reported to have raised objections at least 14 times in ten months, on matters as fundamental as new-voter registration, deletions and restorations, appeals, and control of the digital rolls system – the very machinery that decides who is let into Indian democracy and who is shut out of it. That pattern suggests a constitutional three-member Commission functioning, in practice, as a one-man office, with two colleagues reduced to ornamental status.
This did not happen in isolation. The government first changed how Election Commissioners are chosen, replacing the Chief Justice of India on the selection panel with a Union Cabinet minister nominated by the Prime Minister – handing the executive two of three seats in picking the referees of its own elections. Then came centralised control of the voter list. Then came legal protection for the officials wielding that control. The cumulative message to the ordinary citizen is stark: your name can be removed by a system you cannot see, operated by people you did not choose and cannot hold to account.
Credible, reported questions about a Chief Election Commissioner overriding the Commission’s majority, centralising control over who votes, and treating internal dissent as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a constitutional warning to be heeded – these cannot be waved away. This is the architecture of electoral capture and it demands answers, in public, under scrutiny, before the country next goes to the polls.
Gyanesh Kumar cannot continue as Chief Election Commissioner while there are credible questions that he overrode the majority of the Commission, centralised control over the machinery that determines who votes, and subsequently treated dissent not as a constitutional warning, but as an inconvenience to be managed, and buried.
He must resign and he must be tried for TREASON.