Supreme Court affirms SIR’s performance as progress towards free and fair elections

The Supreme Court on Wednesday (May 27, 2026) upheld the special intensive review (SIR) of electoral rolls as an exercise by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to uphold the constitutional obligation to hold free and fair elections.

“SIR is directly related to the constitutional objective of free and fair elections. Free and fair elections do not depend only on the voting mechanism. It also depends on the integrity, accuracy and purity of the electoral roll which forms the basis of the democratic process,” said a bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi.

Also Read: Bihar SIR High Court Hearing Update – 27 May 2026

The judgment upholding the constitutionality of the Bihar SIR will have an impact on the next rounds of the exercise. The second phase of SIR, covering 51 million voters in 12 states and union territories, including West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, was launched even as the Supreme Court was hearing a challenge to the exercise in Bihar.

The court rejected the petitioners’ view that the SIR was a backdoor attempt to carry out citizenship verification in the name of “cleansing” the electoral roll of foreigners. As part of its powers, the EC should have verified citizenship to a limited extent to determine inclusion or exclusion from the electoral roll, it said.

“Citizenship is a condition precedent to registration. The EC, in the course of preparing or revising electoral rolls, undoubtedly has the power to examine questions related to citizenship,” noted Chief Justice Kant, who authored the 124-page ruling.

The court directed the EC to forward the names of voters who were part of the 2003 electoral roll but were purged in the Bihar SIR on grounds of non-citizenship to the center within the next four weeks for consideration by the competent authority under the Citizenship Act. The authority has to decide their cases before the next Vidhan Sabha or local body elections. If they are found to be citizens, their names should be listed.

The Juggernaut Continues: Editorial on the third phase of the SIR Electoral Rolls

The bench also directed that persons resident in Bihar, whose names may have been wrongfully deleted due to absence, death, duplication or transfer, can challenge the EC’s decision in the courts. The final electoral roll of Bihar released on September 30 last year had 7.42 million voters compared to 7.89 million voters when the EC announced the SIR on June 24, 2025.

The court said the SIR did not replace the Representation of the People Act (Representation of the People Act) or the Voter Registration Rules, 1960. Rather, it breathed life into the constitutional mandate of Article 324 (power of the EC to conduct and supervise elections).

Clear reasoning

The court said the EC had “compelling reasons” for conducting the SIR, namely more than two decades had passed since the last intensive review, extensive additions and deletions during that period, rapid urbanization, migration and the resulting possibility of duplicate or erroneous records. The court stated that the electoral roll is not a static document and must evolve in response to changes in population, residence and eligibility.

He rejected the appellants’ argument that the SIR had no empirical basis. Chief Justice Kant reasoned that large-scale migration, non-reporting of deaths and duplicate records were matters of “common administrative experience”.

The Bench said that the scrutiny authority of the Commission under Article 324 is a “continuous fountain of power” covering every aspect and stage of the electoral machinery to ensure the sanctity of the democratic process.

Section 21(3) of the Electoral Law gave the Commission a “flexible and enabling power” to depart from the routine revision of electoral rolls in any way “it thinks fit” whenever the circumstances require. “The decision to conduct a comprehensive nationwide SIR cannot be considered manifestly excessive. The materials on record indicate that the scope of the problem identified by the Commission was systemic in nature and arose from cumulative inaccuracies over a long period of time. Such a problem does not easily admit of partial solutions,” Chief Justice Kant reasoned.

Protective features in place

The court refused to believe that SIR had caused the suffering. It stated that appropriate safeguards were in place or in place to mitigate hardship and arbitrary exclusion. These included the inclusion of the Aadhaar card as the 12th “indicative” document for citizenship verification; direction to publish the complete list of about 65 million excluded voters in Bihar and active assistance provided by the agent of the political parties at the local level at the booth level.

The court said that the mere existence of a previous entry in the electoral roll cannot preclude a fresh inquiry by the EC under the SIR exercise. He was dealing with the objection raised by the petitioners under Rule 21A of the 1960 Rules that a name already entered in the electoral roll can be deleted without prior notice to the concerned elector and without an opportunity of being heard.

Chief Justice Kant said the “fundamental safeguards” enumerated in Rule 21A were complied with when notices were issued to struck-off voters, an inquiry was conducted and a “reasoned decision” was taken to include or exclude from the electoral roll.

“Before any representative government can count votes, it must first know whose votes can be counted. So the story of democracy is not only the story of voting, but also the identification of those entitled to participate in the election of government,” said Chief Justice Kant.

Published – 27 May 2026 12:44 IST