Panaji: The Goa bench of Bombay High Court has made it clear that names cannot be struck off the electoral roll merely on the basis of a draft roll drawn up during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), unless the process prescribed by law is followed.
A division bench comprising Justice Amit S Jamsandekar and Justice Valmiki Menezes said it was “very perturbed” by the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) position that its electoral software compelled officials to reject an application.
The observations came while the court was hearing a petition by six members of a family whose names were removed from the voters’ list after they moved to another house within the Santa Cruz Assembly constituency, as reported by The New Indian Express.
Court Flags Software-Based Deletions
The petitioners, including Paresh Salgaonkar, told the court that they had filed Form 8 on the advice of the Booth Level Officer to have their residential address corrected. During scrutiny of the applications, however, officials found that the family’s Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) particulars were unavailable on the ERONET portal.
ERONET — short for Electoral Registration Officers’ Network — is the ECI’s online platform used by election authorities to process applications and administer electoral rolls.
According to the petitioners, the absence of EPIC details on the system meant officials were left only with the option of marking their applications as rejected.
They were later told that their EPICs had already been deleted from the electoral roll and that their requests under Form 8 could not, therefore, be processed.
Authorities then directed the family to submit Form 6 applications for fresh enrolment. The petitioners contended that this was untenable because they were already registered voters and had only sought an address change within the same Assembly segment.
Accepting the argument, the bench said the statutory scheme governing electoral forms would be rendered meaningless if names could first be removed through a draft roll and voters were subsequently required to seek fresh registration.
“Otherwise, Form 6, 7 or 8 have no meaning,” the court said, noting that the forms cater to new voters, deletion-related requests and voters shifting residence.
The judges questioned why the ECI had allowed the ERONET system to dictate the outcome of an application involving an existing voter. “He was never a new voter. He was an existing voter. He became new for your system,” the bench remarked.
The court also asked the ECI to identify the legal provision that permitted removal of a voter’s name without first granting the person a hearing.
“Show us from the Act…what empowers you to delete without hearing?” the bench asked.
It further noted that election officials seemed to have treated the software’s response as decisive instead of examining the matter independently. “Your officers were helpless, and they just decided to throw it on the system. So, they recorded it in the order, saying that the system has rejected. We are very perturbed by this,” the bench said.
The judges underlined that an administrative technology platform cannot take precedence over statutory safeguards. They said officials receiving a Form 8 request must independently determine whether the elector had genuinely shifted residence before taking any decision.
The bench also pointed to the possible scale of the problem, observing that the case before it involved only one household but could have consequences for many voters who relocate.
“Here there is only one family. Take a situation where there are so many people who have shifted residence,” the court observed.