Who Decides Who Votes? An Unpublished Software Rule and the Burden It Shifts Onto Delhi's Electors

The Roll Belongs to an Officer

• the Flag Came From a Machine Article 326 promises the vote to every citizen aged 18 or above who is not disqualified by law. It does not say who decides, in a given case, whether that promise holds. The Representation of the People Act, 1950 answers that question. It gives the preparation and revision of each constituency's roll to an Electoral Registration Officer and Rule 20 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 requires that officer to inquire into claims and objections. The design is deliberate: a human officer, a hearing and a reasoned decision. Delhi's revision shows what happens when that design is quietly bypassed.

The rule as written The law lists the grounds that remove a person from the roll: not being a citizen, being declared of unsound mind by a court or being disqualified for corrupt practices.

Eligibility otherwise depends on age and ordinary residence. In Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer (1995), the Supreme Court held that an officer cannot strike a name or demand particular documents, without giving the elector a fair opportunity to be heard. Family size appears nowhere in that list.

The rule as practised According to an unnamed senior election official quoted by The Hindu, the "logical discrepancy" flags in Delhi were raised by the Commission's centralised ERONET software, not by EROs. Five of the eight reasons turn on family structure. The paper reports, for example, that one reason flags an elector when six or more electors named the same person as parent in the 2002 roll. The Hindu then estimated religion with a published name classifier, reported to be about 97 percent accurate. On that estimate:

• Muslims are about 13.6 percent of electors but 20.3 percent of those flagged for discrepancies.
• Under the five family-size reasons, 152 of every 1,000 Muslim electors were flagged, against 56 of every 1,000 others.
• Under the six-or-more-children reason alone, the Muslim share was 58.2 percent. The control case is telling. Bihar's revision did not use these checks and there Muslims were 18.4 percent of deletions against a 17.7 percent share of the adult population, roughly proportionate. The religion figures are an estimate, not recorded data. But the mechanism does not depend on intent. A proxy correlated with fertility will skew by community wherever fertility differs. NFHS-5 shows that gap narrowing, at 2.36 against 1.94, but not closed.

Where the

burden quietly moved A notice is not a deletion. It does something subtler: it requires the elector to prove eligibility on a criterion the law never created. The eight reasons first appeared in writing only in the Phase 3 direction of 14 May 2026, had been used in West Bengal before that without announcement and have never been publicly explained.

That is the constitutional gap. Article 324 gives the Commission superintendence over the rolls, but the statute places the judgment in an officer who must hear the elector. Neither text anticipated a filter that decides before any officer looks.