A procedural anomaly during the recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar has triggered concerns about jurisdiction and adherence to election law. The incident involves the central Election Commission of India (ECI) generating and routing pre-filled hearing notices to local electoral officers, a move that appears to diverge from the clear statutory mandate granting exclusive power to local authorities.
The Legal Mandate vs. Central Action
The core of the issue lies in the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The law explicitly empowers only the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) of an Assembly constituency to question an elector's eligibility and issue a formal notice for a hearing. This decentralized principle was recently underscored by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. At a press conference on August 17, 2025, he stated that neither the Commissioners nor any EC official could add or delete votes outside the legal process, describing revision as a "decentralized construct."
However, in the closing fortnight of the Bihar SIR in September 2025, EROs across the state discovered pre-filled notices on their individual log-ins for the ECI's centralised portal. These notices, addressed to electors who had already submitted forms and were on the draft rolls published in August, bore the EROs' names but were not generated by them. Estimates suggest the notices numbered in lakhs, though the EC has not provided an exact figure.
Details of the Pre-Filled Notices
The notices followed a uniform, pre-filled Hindi format containing elector details like name, EPIC number, constituency, and address. Each notice summoned the elector to appear before the ERO with documents. Crucially, all reviewed notices had a printed tick against the reason "incomplete or deficient documents." They lacked a visible date of issue, though officials indicated the serial number's last eight digits reflected the generation date (e.g., 13092025 for September 13).
According to five Bihar government officials involved, who spoke anonymously, these notices appeared just before the September 25 deadline for disposing of claims and objections. The intended process was for the ERO or Assistant ERO to sign them and for Booth Level Officers (BLOs) to deliver them. Two senior EC officials separately confirmed this sequence.
EC officials explained that the notices were auto-generated after identifying "logical errors" or "logical discrepancies" in submitted forms. Electors were required to submit documents from a prescribed list of 11 or extracts from the 2003 electoral roll.
Impact and Lingering Questions
Despite the scale of the notice generation, the episode did not lead to mass deletions. Official data shows that of the 68.66 lakh deletions in the Bihar revision, only 9,968 remain unexplained; others were due to death, migration, duplication, or absence. Many EROs are learnt to have chosen not to act on these centrally generated notices.
On-ground reports from Patna and Siwan constituencies revealed several instances. RJD MLA Osama Shahab, an elector in Siwan's Raghunathpur, received a notice but his name was retained. His BLO, Jay Shankar Prasad Chaurasiya, called it a "technical" issue resolved upon resubmitting documents. Another elector, Tarik Anwar, was unsure why he was called despite having submitted documents. A BLO in another Siwan booth reported receiving notices for six electors whose documents were already uploaded, with hearings scheduled barely two days after notice. None of those names were deleted in the final roll published on September 30.
The episode raises a significant procedural question: who is authorised to initiate scrutiny once documents are submitted? While the notices cite instruction 5(b) of the SIR guidelines (June 24), which allows EROs to start a suo motu inquiry, the central generation of pre-populated notices unsettles the chain of accountability vested in the local statutory authority.
The Indian Express sent a detailed questionnaire to the Election Commission on December 12 but received no response. The Bihar Chief Electoral Officer was unavailable for comment. As draft rolls are published in five more States/UTs, the Bihar incident highlights a glaring gap in process at the heart of electoral integrity.
