Supreme Court upholds SIR exercise as an advancement towards free and fair elections
The Supreme Court on Wednesday (May 27, 2026) upheld the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as an exercise done by the Election Commission
The Supreme Court on Wednesday (May 27, 2026) upheld the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as an exercise done by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in furtherance of the Constitutional obligation to conduct free and fair elections “SIR bears a direct nexus to the constitutional goal of a free and fair election. Free and fair elections do not rest merely upon the mechanics of polling. They equally depend upon the integrity, accuracy, and purity of the electoral roll which forms the foundation of the democratic process,” a bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi said. Also Read: Bihar SIR Supreme Court hearing updates - May 27, 2026 The judgment affirming the constitutionality of the Bihar SIR will have an impact on further rounds of the exercise. The second phase of the SIR, covering 51 crore voters in 12 States and Union Territories, including West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, had commenced even as the challenge to the exercise in Bihar, was pending in the Supreme Court. The court dismissed the view of the petitioners that the SIR was a backdoor attempt to conduct citizenship screening in the name of “purifying” the electoral roll of aliens. The EC was well within its authority to verify citizenship to the limited extent of determining inclusion or exclusion from the electoral roll, it said. “Citizenship is a condition precedent for enrolment.
The EC, in the course of preparing or revising electoral rolls, is undoubtedly empowered to examine questions bearing upon citizenship,” Chief Justice Kant, who authored the 124-page judgment, observed. The court directed the EC to refer, within the next four weeks, the names of electors who were part of the 2003 electoral roll but were purged in the Bihar SIR on the grounds of being non-citizens, to the Centre for adjudication by a competent authority under the Citizenship Act. The authority must decide their cases before the next Vidhan Sabha or local body elections. Their names should be restored to the rolls if they are found to be citizens. Juggernaut rolls on: Editorial on the third phase of SIR of electoral rolls The Bench also directed that persons domiciled in Bihar, whose names may have been wrongly deleted on the grounds of absence, death, duplication or shifting, could challenge the EC’s decision before the courts. The final Bihar electoral roll published on September 30 last year contained 7.42 crore electors, compared with 7.89 crore when the SIR was notified by the EC on June 24, 2025. The court said the SIR did not supplant the Representation of the People Act (RP Act) or the Registration of Electors Rules of 1960. Rather, it breathed life into the constitutional mandate of Article 324 (EC’s power to conduct and supervise elections).
Cogent justifications The court said the EC had “cogent justifications” to conduct the SIR, namely the passage of more than two decades since the last intensive revision, large-scale additions and deletions over that period, rapid urbanisation, migration, and the resulting possibility of repeated or defective entries. The court said the electoral roll was not a static document and must evolve in response to changes in population, residence, and eligibility. It rejected the petitioners’ argument that the SIR did not have an empirical foundation. Chief Justice Kant justified that large-scale migration, non-reporting of deaths, and duplication of entries were matters of “common administrative experience”. The Bench said the Commission’s supervisory authority under Article 324 was a “continuous wellspring of power” encompassing every facet and stage of the electoral machinery to ensure the sanctity of the democratic process. Section 21(3) of the RP Act conferred the Commission with a “flexible and enabling power” to depart from the regime of ordinary revision of electoral rolls in any manner “as it may deem fit” whenever the circumstances warranted. “The decision to undertake a comprehensive State-wide SIR cannot be said to be manifestly excessive. The material on record indicates that the scale of the problem identified by the Commission was systemic in nature, arising from cumulative inaccuracies over an extended period. Such a problem does not readily admit of piecemeal solutions,” Chief Justice Kant reasoned.
Safeguards in place The court refused to believe that the SIR caused suffering. It said appropriate safeguards were in place or introduced to mitigate hardship and arbitrary exclusion. These involved the inclusion of Aadhaar card as the 12th “indicative” document for citizenship verification; a direction to publish the complete list of approximately 65 lakh excluded electors in Bihar and the active assistance rendered by the booth-level agent of political parties at the grassroot level. The court said the mere existence of a prior entry in the electoral roll cannot preclude a fresh enquiry by the EC in an SIR exercise. It was addressing a contention raised by the petitioners under Rule 21A of the 1960 Rules that a name already entered in the electoral roll can be deleted without prior notice to the elector concerned and an opportunity of hearing. Chief Justice Kant said “core safeguards” enumerated in Rule 21A was followed as deleted electors were issued notice, an enquiry was undertaken, and a “reasoned determination” was made about the inclusion or exclusion from the voter list. “Before any representative government can count votes, it must first know whose votes may be counted. The story of democracy is therefore not only a story of voting, but also of identifying the persons entitled to participate in the choice of government,” Chief Justice Kant said.
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