A Form Is Not a Webpage: Who Can Change Form 6 and Who Is the Election Commission?

The Rulebook Has an Owner and the Commission Has Three Members Form 6, the

form every new voter fills in, does not live on a website. It lives in the Schedule to the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. In plain terms, it is part of delegated law and the lawful way to change it is to amend the Rules, which is the Government's job. Editing what appears on the ECINet portal is not that process. That single point explains why the Supreme Court said what it did on October 5.

The rule as written, the rule as practised The text says the form is fixed by the Rules.

According to the petitions, Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi recorded exactly this on May 16: the form could not be altered without amending the 1960 Rules. Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu concurred on May 19. In practice, the plea alleges, the online form was changed anyway in July 2026.

Applicants now had to declare whether they, their parents or their grandparents were on the previous SIR rolls and could not submit without answering. On August 13, Sandhu reportedly recorded the change as unauthorised and ordered it withdrawn, but it stayed live.

The Commission's defence, in its September 26 statement, was that the SIR declaration had been upheld by the Supreme Court. The bench's reply was blunt: it had approved no modified Form 6 and it wanted to see who had modified what.

There is a genuine grey zone here. In its May judgment upholding the Bihar SIR, the court recognised that the ECI has residual power to frame documentation for a special revision, provided it is not arbitrary and said that power is not unbounded.

But residual power to frame supporting documents is not the same as power to rewrite a form that delegated legislation already prescribes.

Who is "the Commission"?

The second question is structural. Article 324 vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections in "the Election Commission", not in its Chairman. Section 18 of the 2023 Act says how that body decides: unanimously, failing which by majority.

The petitions allege that this collegium was hollowed out. Two of its three members objected on record 14 times in 10 months and decisions still went ahead. If that is borne out by the records, the CEC was acting as though he were the Commission.

In law he is only its presiding member.

Why the

court refused suspension but kept the threat The bench declined to suspend the CEC. Justice Bagchi asked who would then conduct elections and warned against putting the cart before the horse. That is institutional restraint: a court does not decapitate a constitutional body mid-election on the strength of a newspaper report.

But the restraint came with a warning. "We can always annul any decision," the CJI said. Decisions taken neither unanimously nor by majority would be held ultra vires. > The burden has quietly shifted. The petitioners no longer have to prove unilateralism; the Commission has to produce a record showing collegial decisions.

For the exam, the lesson is that constitutional bodies are bound by two kinds of rules: the delegated legislation they administer and the internal design that makes them collective. Form 6 tests the first. Section 18 tests the second.