A petition lodged in the Supreme Court by the INDIA bloc has placed the Election Commission of India's conduct and rulings during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls under judicial scrutiny. According to the petition, Gyanesh Kumar took key rulings as Chief Election Commissioner without consulting or obtaining agreement from his two fellow commissioners.

A document published on 23 September 2026 recorded 14 separate objections filed across a ten-month window, each tied to matters of voter registration, record deletions, or access to electoral data. For its part, the ECI has maintained that every ruling emerged from a process of collective agreement, with divergent viewpoints treated as a routine feature of internal deliberation rather than any cause for concern.

Questions about whether the electoral authority has been functioning with proper oversight have arisen in the wake of the unresolved accusations. At the heart of the petition sits a procedural dispute: whether the nationwide Special Intensive Revision, rolled out in 2025, received formal authorisation from the full Election Commission.

When an RTI filing dated 28 July 2025 requested records connected to the decision, the response it drew contained only the order from 24 June 2025. According to the petition, no formal record existed authorising the start of the SIR by that date, even though the order pointed in a different direction. A press note issued by the ECI on 26 September 2026 asserted that the decision had gone through without any dissenting vote — a claim the petition now disputes.

Filed with the court, the petition calls on the Supreme Court to obtain the relevant original documents so that the approval process can be examined more closely. Among the legal arguments put forward in the petition is a reference to the Supreme Court's 1995 ruling in T.N. Seshan v. Union of India, which established that decision-making authority within the Election Commission is shared equally among all commissioners, with no single member — including the Chief Election Commissioner — holding a higher tier of power than the rest. The petition draws on statutory wording that calls for broad agreement among parties, a requirement some argue sits uneasily alongside what the constitution demands.

Among the grievances detailed in the petition are questions about alterations made to the online Form 6 during July 2026, with the filing contending that those changes introduced a requirement for applicants to disclose whether they or their family members appeared on earlier electoral rolls. Those filing the petition contend that the modifications took effect without the formal revisions to the governing electoral framework — namely the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 — that would ordinarily accompany such changes. On 5 October 2026, a verbal statement from the Supreme Court made clear that the modifications in question had not received the court's approval.

The petition also raises questions about whether the updated requirements could place hurdles in the path of first-time voters and prospective candidates, adding layers of difficulty to an already involved registration process. Calls for an independent audit of ECINET and ERONET — the Election Commission's two digital platforms that underpin the administration of elections — have been put forward in the filing.

Among the concerns set out in the petition are questions about the accuracy of voter records and whether Electoral Registration Officers have the capacity to correct wrongful removals. Cited within the petition is a related legal matter involving the removal of roughly 13 crore names from voter rolls across multiple states during the SIR process. According to the ECI, those numbers cover entries flagged as absent, deceased, or duplicate, and no final removals have yet been confirmed from that pool.

A formal request has been filed asking that those removals be reviewed to determine whether any voters were taken off the rolls without proper grounds. Questions were also put forward about how bulk Form 7 objections had been handled, with those raising them pointing to assertions that voter names had been forged and declarations falsified, resulting in removals from the electoral roll without the affected individuals being notified.

Among the petition's provisions are tighter protections and a pathway for voters whose names were wrongly struck from the rolls to have their registration restored. The petition points to Punjab as an example of how such electoral changes can affect outcomes on the ground, contending that a drop of roughly 20.66 lakh names from the draft electoral roll leaves qualifying voters at risk of being removed from the rolls without sufficient time or recourse to restore their registration.