Supreme Court questions Delhi voter deletions, asks EC to keep Forms 6 and 8 open

What the court asked the Election Commission to do

A three-judge bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana was hearing petitions filed by activists Anjali Bharadwaj and Amrita Johri against aspects of the Delhi revision exercise. The bench asked the Commission to consider letting voters who were deleted from the draft rolls because they did not return enumeration forms to still submit those forms, particularly if they were only temporarily away from Delhi for work or personal reasons.

The judges also said voters who had shifted to a different address within Delhi should be allowed to use Form 8, the form for a change of address, rather than being asked to register afresh. The Chief Justice suggested the Commission issue a public notice in simple language clarifying that Form 6 is required only from first-time voters, and that Forms 6 and 8 would continue to be accepted without a cut-off date for now. The Commission's counsel said it would examine the suggestions and discuss remedial steps with the authorities, and assured the court orally that the October 30 deadline for claim and objection forms would be extended.

The court itself did not pass an order extending the deadline, saying it expected the Commission to act on its own, and posted the matter for hearing again after two weeks. The Chief Justice also suggested publishing the list of the roughly 43 lakh deleted voters so they could approach their booth level officers.

Why Form 6 became the central dispute

The dispute turns on what a deleted voter must declare to return to the rolls. Form 6 is the application used by first-time voters, and it requires the applicant to declare that they have never been enrolled as a voter before. The petitioners argued, through advocate Prashant Bhushan, that asking people who were already on the 2026 rolls to file Form 6 would force them into a false declaration, since their names had previously been on the voter list.

The bench agreed that this was a problem, with Justice Bagchi describing it as an error to call upon a previously enrolled voter to declare that their name was never in the voter list. The judges noted that many Delhi residents may never have received enumeration forms because they had changed address or were travelling, and questioned whether a voter should lose the right to be on the roll merely for not returning a form. The court stressed that the right to vote is a vital right and that a failure to respond should not lead to its permanent forfeiture.

The Commission's counsel, senior advocate Dama Seshadri Naidu, told the court that if a person shifts residence, the procedure expects them to inform the authorities so the list can be updated, and that records otherwise continue to show the old address. The bench responded that in a large city with a shifting population, the burden should not rest entirely on voters, and that the Commission should reach out to them instead.

The numbers and the undecided 'logical discrepancy' question

According to a Commission press note cited by the petitioners' counsel in court, Delhi had 1,45,10,299 electors enrolled at the start of the revision, of whom 97,53,577 submitted enumeration forms. The remaining 47,56,722 did not return the forms and were recorded as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate entries. The petitioners said about 43 lakh of the deleted voters were classified as permanently shifted or absent, and that over 19 lakh electors in the draft roll were issued notices on the ground of logical discrepancy.

On that last point, the court made clear that it has not yet ruled on whether logical discrepancy is a valid ground for deletion. Justice Bagchi said the category had not been part of the Bihar revision exercise, so the earlier judgment upholding the Bihar revision could not be treated as a binding precedent on it, and that it had been permitted in West Bengal only as an interim arrangement. The court said it would examine at a later stage whether software-generated patterns flagging mismatches in names, ages or family details amount to an application of mind by a human authority.

The judges also questioned how entries from the 2003 rolls, drawn up after the last intensive revision at that time, could be reopened on this ground in the current exercise. For now, the practical outcome of the hearing is that the Commission has been asked to keep the doors open for deleted voters through enumeration forms and Form 8, and to report back on the steps it takes when the matter returns in two weeks.

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