NEW DELHI: The Bombay High Court’s Goa bench on Wednesday questioned the Election Commission over the deletion of voters’ names during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), saying a draft electoral roll cannot be used as the basis for deleting names and that administrative software cannot override statutory law.
The court was hearing a petition filed by six members of a family whose names were deleted from the electoral roll after they moved to a new house within the same Santa Cruz Assembly constituency. The bench said it was “very perturbed” by the EC’s explanation that its software did not allow officials to process their applications.
A division bench of Justices Amit S Jamsandekar and Valmiki Menezes also questioned the EC on the legal provision that allows voters to be deleted without giving them an opportunity to be heard.
The petitioners, led by Paresh Salgaonkar, said they had shifted to a new house within the same constituency and were instructed by the Booth Level Officer to submit Form 8 for a change of address.
However, when their applications were processed, their Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) details were reportedly not found in the ERONET system. The petitioners said the software then gave officials only one option — “reject”. ERONET, or Electoral Registration Officers’ Network, is the EC’s web-based system for processing electoral forms and managing voter rolls.
The family was subsequently informed that their EPICs had already been deleted from the rolls and that their Form 8 applications could not be processed.
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