Who Decides a Voter Is Doubtful? The Supreme Court Puts the Election Commission's Software on Trial

The Officer the Law Named and the Software That Replaced Him The Representation of the People Act, 1950

does not hand the electoral roll to a machine. Section 13B entrusts the preparation and revision of each constituency's roll to an Electoral Registration Officer, a named human official who must decide claims and objections.

The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 then lay out the forms through which a voter is added, objected to or corrected. Nowhere does the text contemplate a central algorithm making the first cut. That silence is not deliberate.

It is a gap nobody anticipated and it is exactly where the Supreme Court has now placed its finger.

What the

Bench actually asked At the 28 October hearing on Delhi's Special Intensive Revision, Justice Joymalya Bagchi framed two questions the Court says it will answer:

• Whether the patterns the ECI built into its software amount to application of mind by a human agency. In law, application of mind means an officer weighing the facts of a particular case before acting.
• Whether a voter's laxity or non-response can be a ground to forfeit the right to vote permanently. The scale explains the urgency. Of Delhi's 1,45,10,299 electors, 19,34,243 on the draft roll received logical discrepancy notices. The flags reportedly cover patterns such as six or more siblings, spelling mismatches and unusual parent-child age gaps. Prashant Bhushan, for the petitioners, argued that the ECI has never defined logical discrepancy in any document.

The rule as written, the rule as practised The text says an ERO must hear a claim and decide it.

In practice, a centralised system generates suspicion in bulk and the burden of answering shifts to the voter. For a voter whose name has stood on the roll since earlier revisions, that reverses the order the law intends.

The Supreme Court settled that order three decades ago. In Lal Babu Hussein (1995) it held that a name cannot be struck off on mere suspicion. Natural justice requires a hearing and the burden lies on whoever wants the name removed. Article 326 sharpens the point.

It guarantees adult suffrage and allows disqualification only on grounds the law specifies: non-residence, unsoundness of mind, crime or corrupt or illegal practice. A spelling mismatch is not on that list. Failing to answer a notice is not on it either, unless it is read as evidence of non-residence and that is precisely the inference an algorithm cannot reliably draw in a city where people move between neighbourhoods.

The CJI made this point directly, suggesting the ECI should go to voters in a mobile city rather than place the burden on them.

Why the

Bihar verdict does not close this The ECI relied on the Court's 27 May 2026 judgment in ADR v. ECI, which upheld the Bihar SIR. Justice Bagchi distinguished it: logical discrepancy was not used in Bihar and its use in West Bengal was allowed only as an interim measure.

The question is therefore genuinely open. For GS2, this case turns an old principle into a new test. Due process before disenfranchisement was written for a human officer. The Court must now decide whether that guarantee survives when the first decision is made by code.