India’s Election Commission is facing fresh scrutiny after an investigation found that two of its three members repeatedly objected to decisions made during a nationwide revision of voter rolls, including changes they said were carried out without their knowledge or approval.

Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi recorded objections at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions involving new voter registrations, deletion and restoration of names, appeals over voter eligibility and control of the digital systems used to maintain electoral rolls, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday, 23 September.

In one case, Sandhu described a change to the voter-registration process as “unauthorized and illegal”. In others, the commissioners warned that control of the electoral database was being centralized in New Delhi in ways that could restrict the powers of local officials who are legally responsible for deciding who appears on the rolls.

The Election Commission rejected suggestions that the exchanges showed a breakdown in its decision-making.

In a statement issued after the report, it said differing views and written observations were a normal part of internal deliberations and that all major decisions taken by the full Commission over the past year, including those relating to the voter-roll revision, had been unanimous. It said its digital systems operated under established legal and data-security procedures.

That response leaves two accounts of the same period.

The Commission says its final decisions carried the agreement of all three members. The internal records reported by The Indian Express show Sandhu and Joshi repeatedly complaining that orders or administrative changes had been made before they were consulted, and in some cases saying that action had been taken despite their written advice.

India’s Election Commission is not run by its chief alone. Under the Constitution, authority over national and state elections is vested in the Election Commission as an institution. The current body consists of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and Election Commissioners Sandhu and Joshi.

Section 18 of the 2023 law governing the Commission says its business should, as far as possible, be conducted unanimously. Where the commissioners differ, the majority decides. The same law says the procedure and allocation of Commission business can be set by unanimous decision.

Sandhu and Joshi form that majority.

In April, both commissioners separately reminded senior officials that communications issued in the Commission’s name required the Commission’s approval. Sandhu wrote on 16 April that many communications were being sent without such approval. Joshi followed on 24 April, saying that several communications had gone out without the requisite authorization.

The dispute has unfolded during one of the largest exercises the Commission has undertaken in recent years.

A voter-roll revision on a vast scale

India has close to a billion registered voters, and its electoral rolls are maintained constituency by constituency by officials known as Electoral Registration Officers, or EROs. The Commission began a Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, in Bihar in June 2025, saying years of migration, deaths, duplicate registrations and other changes had reduced the accuracy of the state’s voter lists.

Unlike the routine annual updating of rolls, an intensive revision involves large-scale verification of existing voters and new applicants. The Bihar exercise was challenged before the Supreme Court, which in May 2026 upheld the Commission’s power to conduct it. The court said the revision served a legitimate purpose and that the Commission had authority to carry out limited scrutiny of citizenship when deciding voter eligibility.

The exercise subsequently expanded across India.

Across its phases, more than 130 million names have been removed from or left off draft and final rolls. Some of those exclusions can later be reversed through claims, objections and appeals, so the figure does not mean that 130 million people have permanently lost voting rights.

The scale has nevertheless made the process politically contentious, particularly where large numbers of voters have had to prove their eligibility again.

The internal objections reported this week concern some of the machinery behind that process.

Dispute over new voter applications

One disagreement centered on Form 6, the standard application used by Indians registering as voters. A new question appeared on the form in July asking applicants whether they, their parents or their grandparents were present on the electoral roll used in the previous intensive revision.

The question linked ordinary new-voter registration to the SIR process. Although the section was not formally marked mandatory, applicants could not complete the online form without answering it.

Joshi had warned in May that Form 6 could not be altered in that way without an amendment to the rules by the government, according to the Express investigation. Sandhu agreed with him.

The change went ahead.

On 13 August, Sandhu put his objection on record, describing the addition as “unauthorized and illegal” and asking for it to be removed.

The dispute has wider consequences because Form 6 is used by people turning 18 and others seeking to enter the voter list for the first time.

Who controls the voter database

A second and potentially more consequential disagreement involved the technology used to run India’s electoral rolls.

The legal system is deliberately decentralized. An ERO assigned to each assembly constituency determines additions and deletions, hears claims and objections and has statutory responsibility for the list in that constituency.

The Commission has increasingly moved that work onto centralized digital platforms, first ERONet and more recently ECINet, a system launched in January that combines more than 40 election-related applications and portals.

Sandhu and Joshi raised concerns that the software was beginning to restrict what EROs could actually do.

Joshi warned in May about what he called the “gradual centralization of the electoral roll database” and proposed an external technical audit to ensure that only officials legally empowered to alter voter records had the credentials to do so.

Sandhu raised similar concerns in August after state officials reported that they lacked full access to the system.

The issue was not simply who could see a database. In several cases, local officials who had reached decisions on voter eligibility were unable to enter those decisions because the software did not permit it.

Goa provided one example.

After the Supreme Court ordered that voters flagged by the system for inconsistencies be allowed to submit documents and be heard, EROs in Goa reviewed a group of cases and found 97 people eligible to remain on the roll.

The system did not give them the ability to reverse the earlier exclusion.

The office of Goa’s chief electoral officer sent eight requests between 11 and 17 February seeking the necessary software function. It was not enabled before the final roll was published, and the 97 names were left out.

For Sandhu and Joshi, according to the Express investigation, cases such as this raised a legal question: whether software managed centrally in Delhi was effectively limiting decisions that Parliament had entrusted to statutory officers in the states.

Their concerns eventually went beyond internal correspondence.

When an administrative change in New Delhi appeared likely to concentrate more control over election technology, both commissioners separately wrote to Cabinet Secretary T.V. Somanathan, India’s most senior civil servant.

West Bengal appeals raise another question

The revision became especially contentious in West Bengal, where millions of records were flagged for inconsistencies before the state election earlier this year.

The Supreme Court intervened in the process and required judicial officers to examine the eligibility of about 6 million voters whose records had been flagged. About 2.7 million were subsequently removed, and retired High Court judges were appointed to hear appeals.

By September, the Commission told the Supreme Court that about 3.8 million appeals were pending. Roughly 2.22 million had been filed by people seeking restoration of names that had been deleted. Another 1.61 million challenged the inclusion of voters whom judicial officers had found eligible.

That second group drew Sandhu’s attention.

In August, he asked who had authorized appeals seeking deletion of voters who had already been cleared by judicial officers and who had actually filed them on the Commission’s behalf. He wrote that neither he, Joshi nor West Bengal’s chief electoral officer had been told how those appeals had been authorized, according to The Indian Express.

There is no evidence that the disputed deletions determined the outcome of the West Bengal election. The Express found that in constituencies where the number of deleted names exceeded the winning margin, seats were divided fairly evenly between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress.

EC says process remained unanimous

The Election Commission has sought to draw a line between internal observations and final decisions. It said written notes, technical proposals and differences during discussion should not be treated as formal dissent. According to the Commission, all decisions of the full three-member body during the period were eventually unanimous.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party made a similar argument, saying debate among commissioners demonstrated that the institution allowed differing views and that the decision to undertake the SIR ultimately had the agreement of all three members.

Opposition parties took the opposite view, arguing that the internal correspondence strengthened their long-running allegations that the Commission had become less independent of the government. Those allegations have been rejected by the Commission and the BJP.

Neither Sandhu nor Joshi publicly responded to questions from The Indian Express before publication of its investigation. The newspaper said the Commission also did not answer its detailed questionnaire before the story appeared.

Appointment system before SC

The disclosures come as the method for choosing India’s election commissioners is itself under legal challenge. A 2023 law created a three-member selection committee consisting of the prime minister, the leader of the opposition in the lower house of Parliament and a cabinet minister nominated by the prime minister.

The arrangement gives the government two members on the three-person selection panel. It replaced an interim system ordered by the Supreme Court earlier in 2023 under which the chief justice of India sat on the selection committee alongside the prime minister and opposition leader.

Kumar, Sandhu and Joshi were all appointed under the new law.

On Wednesday, 23 September, the Supreme Court delivered a split decision in litigation challenging that appointment system. Justice Dipankar Datta questioned whether a committee dominated numerically by the executive could provide the appearance of institutional independence, while Justice Satish Chandra Sharma said the constitutional validity of the law should be decided by a larger bench. The matter is now to be placed before the chief justice for further consideration.