Election Commission Press Note Fixes What It Said Wasn't Broken

Election Commission Press Note Reads Like a Confession

On September 23, the Election Commission of India said there was nothing unusual about the objections two of its three members had put on record. Its press note that day described written notes and observations as routine practice. It said the Commissioners' suggestions were only meant to improve the electoral process, and that every decision of the past year had been taken unanimously by the full Commission.

Three days later, the story had changed. On Saturday afternoon, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar sat down at Nirvachan Sadan with Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. By evening, the Commission had released a second press note, along with a photograph of the three men together. It was meant to end talk of a rift. Read next to the first, it does something else. It fixes, one by one, the very problems the Commission had said did not exist.

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The Fixes Tell the Story

The Indian Express reported on September 23 that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected at least 14 times in ten months to decisions taken without their knowledge. One of Joshi's complaints, recorded on April 16, was that for more than a year he had received no agenda before Commission meetings and no minutes after them. On Saturday, the Commission decided that agendas would now be circulated in advance and minutes issued. An institution does not promise to start keeping minutes unless it had stopped keeping them.

Joshi had also objected, the same day, to officers travelling abroad without the Commission's approval. The new press note says such approval will now be taken. Sandhu had complained that he learnt about new IT modules and portals from the media. The Commission now says every new IT module and portal will first go to a Committee of Officers and then to the Commission for approval. The note also promises that officers' annual appraisal reports will be completed within the existing December 31 deadline, without saying why that needed to be said.

Then there is the line that says the most. The Commission resolved that all directions issued by the Commissioners to its officers "shall be meticulously complied with". As former Punjab Special Chief Secretary KBS Sidhu has pointed out, the word is Commissioners, in the plural. A constitutional body does not need to announce that its own members will be obeyed unless they were not being obeyed.

None of these decisions is wrong. Most are overdue. But most of them match a complaint on record, and together they contradict the claim, made just three days earlier, that the objections were routine suggestions.

The Officer Two Commissioners Had to Stop

The most telling part of the Election Commission press note concerns the letters Sandhu and Joshi wrote separately to the Cabinet Secretary in July. The Commission says those letters had nothing to do with policy and were about the working of an officer on deputation to the Commission.

In the same passage, however, the Commission confirms three things. The officer issued orders redistributing work. Those orders touched the oversight of the Commission's IT division, which runs the systems holding the country's voter rolls. And they were not implemented after the two Commissioners issued their own orders. The note adds that the Deputy Election Commissioner's oversight of the IT division was never actually withdrawn.

Put simply, an officer tried to change who supervises the software behind India's electoral rolls, and two of the three Commissioners had to step in to stop it. When they did, they were acting as a majority of the Commission, which is how the law expects disagreements to be settled. The first press note made no mention of any such disagreement. The second does not name the officer, and it does not say whether anyone authorised those orders.

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Relief for Voters, and a Quiet Admission

The note also brings real relief to ordinary voters, and that deserves credit. People who received notices during the ongoing SIR, because their names could not be matched with older rolls or because the software flagged a "logical discrepancy", will no longer have to appear in person for a hearing. Booth Level Officers will visit their homes, collect documents and upload them for the Electoral Registration Officer to decide. Any adult family member can attend on a voter's behalf where a hearing is still needed. District officials are to set up help desks and camps for the homeless, labourers and the poor. In Delhi, where Sidhu estimates more than 30 lakh notices have been issued, the deadline for claims and objections has been extended to October 30.

The Commission also says that anyone left out during the SIR, or since, can apply for inclusion, and that state officials will launch a special enrolment drive. That is welcome. It is also an acknowledgement that many people were left out.

Goa shows the pattern clearly. After a Supreme Court order in January, the state's Electoral Registration Officers heard the cases of flagged voters and found 97 of them eligible. The software gave them no way to restore those names. According to the Express, the office of the state's Chief Electoral Officer wrote eight times in February asking the Commission to enable a fix, and got no answer. The press note now says Goa's Chief Electoral Officer has sent booth-level officers to these voters, and that 81 of the 97 have filed Form 6. It does not explain why people already found eligible must apply again, or why eight letters went unanswered.

What the Commission's Defenders Say

The Commission's supporters have taken three points from the note. BJP president Nitin Nabin said the Commission had made clear that every SIR decision was taken unanimously by the full Commission, and accused the Congress of building its allegations on "a manufactured lie". The note does say that the SIR order of June 24, 2025, and the schedules issued on October 27, 2025 and May 14, 2026, had the unanimous approval of the Commission.

The second point is the Supreme Court. The note says the court upheld the SIR order on May 27, 2026, and that the declaration attached to Form 6 during the SIR has also been upheld. The third is that the letters to the Cabinet Secretary concerned one officer, not policy.

On their face, these points suggest the controversy was an internal administrative matter inflated for political gain. They do not survive a closer look.

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Why That Defence Falls Short

Neither Sandhu nor Joshi is reported to have objected to launching the SIR. Their objections were about how it was being run: changes to Form 6, appeals filed in the Commission's name in West Bengal, access to the voter database, and letters issued without the Commission's approval. The note offers no evidence of unanimous approval for any of these. It is also hard to prove unanimity for a period in which, by the Commission's own new decision, there were no minutes.

The Supreme Court defence is narrower than it sounds. The court may well have upheld the declaration used during the SIR. What the two Commissioners objected to was something else. According to the Express, in July, after the court's May 27 order, a question about whether the applicant, a parent or a grandparent appeared on the last SIR roll was built into the Form 6 that every new voter fills, and applicants could not submit the form without answering it. Joshi had warned in May that the form could not be changed without the Central Government amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. The press note now says that outside the SIR period, the forms prescribed under those Rules will be used. That is a partial concession of Joshi's point. The Congress's Pawan Khera has asked what that concession is worth if, as he says, no special summary revision has taken place since January 2024. The Supreme Court is also still hearing matters arising from the SIR in West Bengal.

As for the Cabinet Secretary, describing the dispute as being about one officer does not make it smaller. It raises a harder question: why did two constitutional office-holders have to write to the government's top bureaucrat to rein in a subordinate, and why did the Commission's own processes not stop that officer first?

The Questions Still Waiting

What the note leaves out matters as much as what it says. It is silent on the 16.10 lakh appeals filed before tribunals in West Bengal seeking to delete voters whom judicial officers had included in the rolls. Sandhu asked in August who authorised those appeals in the Commission's name, and there is still no public answer. It says nothing directly about the objection first recorded in October 2025, that letters and orders were going out in the Commission's name without its approval. It does not say how many voters outside Goa may have been kept off the rolls because the software would not let officers correct their records.

The review of ECINET, the Commission's new digital platform, raises its own doubts. It will be led by a Senior Deputy Election Commissioner, an officer from inside the Commission, with one outside expert from an IIT or IIIT. Its brief is to check whether the system follows the law. Joshi had asked for something more specific in May: an audit to confirm that no one except the officers the law empowers can change voter records. Sidhu has also noted that the tests used to flag "logical discrepancies" have never been published.

The Opposition has called the Election Commission of India's press release a damage control exercise. The Congress's Jairam Ramesh described it as "wishy-washy", and INDIA bloc parties are due to meet on September 30. The Commission's own words, though, make the stronger case. In three days it went from calling the objections routine to acting on many of them. It deserves credit for meeting as a full Commission and for easing the burden on voters. But it cannot correct a failure while denying that the failure happened.