Prashant Bhushan, representing the Association of Non-Governmental Organizations for Democratic Reforms along with advocate Neha Rathi, appeared before a bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and criticized the EC for its “lack of transparency at every stage of the SIR exercise”. File | Photo credit: The Hindu
Advocate Prashant Bhushan told the Supreme Court on Thursday (Dec 4, 2025) that the Election Commission had issued “cyclostyled” notices to 26 lakh people during the Bihar SIR asking them to prove their eligibility.
He claimed that thousands of duplicate voters still remained in the final Bihar electoral roll prepared after the SIR exercise.
Mr Bhushan, representing the Association of Non-Governmental Organizations for Democratic Reforms along with advocate Neha Rathi, appearing before a panel headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, criticized the EC for its “lack of transparency at every stage of the SIR exercise”.
“The EC did not publish the list of delisted voters for 2025 until it was forced to do so by the Supreme Court in an order dated August 14,” Mr. Bhushan said.
He argued that although the EC’s press notices listed the number of claims and objections received, these were not made available online in the required “clickable” format, i.e. a format in which the forms can be accessed by clicking on an entry in the list.
He said that the EC had not recorded either the 2003 intensive review instructions or evidence of a previous investigation to demonstrate the need for an “expedited” SIR.
“The EC did not conduct any software deduplication exercise during Bihar SIR which resulted in around 15 lakh suspected duplicate voters in Bihar electoral roll,” he said citing media reports.
A similar fate was bound to follow in the second phase of SIR if the EC continued to ignore the deduplication software to weed out duplicate, fake or multiple entries after field verification, he warned.
He said that electoral rolls and lists of claims and objections, as well as old electoral rolls, must be made available by the EC in a machine-readable format to ensure transparency and access.
Published – 04 Dec 2025 23:01 IST
