SIR row: Electoral registration officers cannot determine citizenship of voters, SC told

New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) The electoral registration officers have no power to determine citizenship of a voter and the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls suffered from severe procedural lapses, lack of transparency, and jurisdictional overreach regarding citizenship determination, the Supreme Court was told on Thursday.

The submissions were made by lawyer Prashant Bhushan, appearing for one of the petitioners who is opposed to the poll body’s decision to undertake SIR of electoral rolls in various states, before a bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi on the fourth day of final arguments.

Referring to various judgements, Bhushan said, “It is very clear that it is not the job of the ERO to determine citizenship. All that they can do is to refer it to the authorities concerned if they feel that the citizenship of a person is doubtful.” The ERO will have to record reasons while referring the issue of doubtful citizens to the concerned authorities and he will have to await the decision, Bhushan said.

“Whether it is the Union home ministry under the Citizenship Act, whether it is a Foreigners Tribunal, whether it is a court, these authorities alone will determine it,” he added.

Even if a person is of unsound mind, the EC cannot delete the name from the electoral roll on its own, he said.

He alleged mass deletion of voters from the electoral rolls and said that in Bihar, when the SIR was announced, the electoral roll contained 7.89 crore names.

However, upon publication of the draft roll, approximately 65 lakh names had been deleted, he added.

Bhushan flagged a procedural anomaly in which those deleted were forced to re-apply using Form 6, a form designated for new voters.

"To fill Form 6, they would have to file a false declaration that they were not on the electoral roll, whereas in fact they were," he said, adding that only 21 lakh voters were subsequently added back during the claims period.

Drawing parallels to the exclusion of bona fide citizens during the NRC (National Register of Citizens) exercise in Assam, he said that demanding specific documents for verification disproportionately affects the poor.

"In a poor country like India, at least 25 per cent of people will be excluded because they cannot produce documents," he said, suggesting that affidavits from the individual and testimony from neighbours should suffice for verification.

The senior advocate alleged that 26 lakh voters in Bihar received generic, "cyclostyled" notices demanding they prove their eligibility without providing specific reasons for the objection.

While 86 per cent of these cases were accepted, roughly 3.66 lakh voters were dropped through this objection mechanism, he added.

He said the EC failed to follow its own transparency manuals.

Despite rules requiring daily online updates of application forms and the sharing of claim lists with political parties, "in Bihar, they did not do so at all, and they are not doing so even now in other states," Bhushan said.

Concluding his arguments, he said that despite the presence of five lakh duplicate voters, the most effective method of verification through social audits via Gram Sabhas or Ward Sabhas was bypassed.

He argued that reading out names in a public gathering is the most credible way to track voters who have shifted or died, yet "no social audit has been conducted".

The bench will resume hearing on pleas on December 9.

On Tuesday, senior advocate Abhishek Singhvi said the EC's reasons like "rapid urbanisation" and "frequent migration" for undertaking SIR of electoral rolls were "untenable" and its power to revise rolls of any constituency did not empower it to do it pan-India. PTI SJK SJK KVK KVK