Signed by Three, Known to One: The Collegiality Gap the Election Commission's Affidavit Leaves Open

The Affidavit Proves Signatures. Collegiality Is About Something Else. Section 18 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023

tells the Commission how to decide. Business is to be transacted unanimously as far as possible and if members differ, the majority view prevails. What the section does not say is what may happen in the Commission's name before a matter reaches all three members. That silence is the real subject of the ECI's affidavit, though the affidavit never says so.

The rule as written The ECI's defence rests on three pillars:

• Unanimity on paper. The three SIR scheduling orders, dated 24 June 2025, 27 October 2025 and 14 May 2026, were all passed unanimously.
• A file route. Files go to one Election Commissioner, then the other, then the CEC. Approved decisions carry all three signatures before the Secretariat notifies them.
• Notes are not decisions. Observations, queries and suggestions recorded by individual commissioners are, in the affidavit's words, part of the consultative process. On its own terms, this is a coherent defence. A body with three members will debate and debate on file should not be confused with the decision that follows it.

The rule as practised The difficulty lies in what the affidavit itself concedes.

• Form 6. The ECI says only the Central Government can amend Form 6. It also acknowledges that the way the SIR declaration was displayed online could be read as such an amendment. According to the Indian Express, Joshi had recorded in May that the form could not be changed without amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 and Sandhu agreed. The online form was nevertheless changed in July and Sandhu reportedly learnt of it from a newspaper. On 21 October, the ER Division decided to separate the two online.
• West Bengal. The affidavit states that appeals against orders restoring voters were filed by officers in the state Chief Electoral Officer's office and were never brought to the Commission. Neither concession is about a vote that two members lost. Both are about actions taken before any vote. The two Election Commissioners' 14 notes, as the Indian Express reads them, objected to exactly that.

Where the

gap sits In T.N. Seshan v. Union of India (1995), the Supreme Court held that the CEC is first among equals and holds no superior authority over the other commissioners. Majority rule under Section 18 protects that equality only if a decision passes through the members first.

An action that reaches them afterwards or not at all, is not overruled dissent; it bypasses collegiality altogether. That is why the unanimous signatures prove less than they appear to. Three members can sign a defence of a process without that process ever having been collegial.

For the aspirant, the lesson is structural. Article 324 makes the Election Commission multi-member but says almost nothing about how its members share power. The 2023 Act supplies a voting rule but no rule on prior consultation.

The Supreme Court is now being asked, in effect, to read the second rule into the first.