How elections are changing

After the din and bustle settles in Bihar, the discussion is on the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR). This was conceived as a corrective exercise-an opportunity to update and cleanse electoral rolls with precision. Instead, it has become the subject of mounting controversy, with widespread complaints of wrongful deletions and data inconsistencies. The issue, initially dismissed as administrative error, has now taken on a political dimension, sharpening long-standing debates over the integrity of India’s voter lists.At the heart of the current storm is Bihar, where the SIR process appears to have produced outcomes far removed from its intended purpose. According to projections, Bihar’s adult population in July 2025 stood at 8.18 crore. Naturally, the electoral roll should reflect roughly the same figure. Yet the Election Commission’s updated numbers show only 7.24 crore registered voters-a startling deficit of 94 lakh adults. Instead of expanding the rolls by an expected 25 lakh new electors, the SIR has resulted in a net reduction of approximately 69 lakh names. The consequence has been a dramatic fall in the Electors-to-Adult Population Ratio (EP Ratio), which slid from 97% in 2024 to just 88% a year later. Such a plunge cannot be explained by normal demographic shifts. More troubling is the fact that Bihar’s SIR exercise recorded virtually no additions at all-an implausible outcome in a state where millions turn 18 each year. The process, critics argue, resembled a deletion drive rather than a balanced revision. This alarm is not confined to Bihar. If similar patterns were to occur on a national scale, nearly 9 crore Indians could effectively find themselves shut out of the electoral process. It is this fear that propelled several petitioners to approach the Supreme Court. The matter awaits judgment, but the concerns remain urgent and deeply consequential. The debate has been further inflamed by charges from opposition leaders, like Rahul, who claimed that the BJP’s victory in Haryana was aided by alleged manipulation of electoral rolls underscores how deeply contested the issue has become. At stake is not merely partisan advantage but public faith in democratic procedures. There are established, transparent methods of maintaining accurate rolls-methods the Commission has used in the past with success. The most reliable among them is a social audit at the booth level. When residents gather and examine the list name by name, local knowledge exposes errors with unmatched accuracy: deaths, migrations, duplicate entries, and missing voters all come to light. Such community-based verification has long been regarded as the gold standard for electoral housekeeping. Alongside this, experts have long advocated making the electoral roll available in machine-readable formats. When combined with modern deduplication tools-face-matching algorithms, name-address detection software, and other AI-driven systems-the Commission has more than enough technological capability to ensure accuracy. Yet the reluctance to deploy these tools or to enable public scrutiny has only deepened suspicion that opacity, not efficiency, is guiding the current approach. The results of the elections in Bihar will inevitably be analyzed through the prism of these concerns. Whether the SIR affected the final outcome is a question that political analysts will debate. But beyond electoral arithmetic lies a far more important truth: the credibility of voter rolls. The Election Commission must recognize the seriousness of the complaints, address them with transparency, and rebuild the trust that forms the foundation of India’s electoral system.