Mahua Moitra has moved the Supreme Court against the ECI’s voter list revision in Bihar, calling it unconstitutional. She warns it could unfairly exclude lakhs of genuine voters, especially the poor and migrants.
New Delhi: Trinamool Congress (TMC) Member of Parliament, Mahua Moitra, has filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court of India challenging the recent move by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to conduct a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bihar.
The petition has been filed under Article 32 of the Constitution, marking it as a Public Interest Litigation (PIL). Moitra claims that the order issued on 24 June 2025 violates constitutional rights and could lead to massive voter exclusion just months before the upcoming Bihar elections.
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In her petition, Moitra urged the Supreme Court to immediately stop the implementation of the SIR order in Bihar. She has also requested the Court to stop the Election Commission from conducting any such exercise in other states in the future.
She argues that the order is not only arbitrary but also unconstitutional. According to her, it unfairly affects poor people, women, and migrant workers—sections of society who may face difficulties in producing specific documents to prove their eligibility to vote.
This is the first time that the ECI is conducting such an exercise where even those voters whose names are already on the electoral rolls and who have voted multiple times in the past are being asked to re-verify their eligibility.
Moitra and her legal team claim this process is
“unprecedented” and could “lead to large-scale disenfranchisement of eligible voters in the country thereby undermining democracy and free and fair elections in the country.”
The ECI’s June 24 order mandates that voters must provide citizenship documents for their names to be included or retained in the voter list.
These documents include proof of citizenship of either or both parents. If a voter fails to provide these, they may be excluded from the electoral roll.
Moitra’s petition argues that this requirement is “ultra vires Article 326” of the Indian Constitution. It claims that this introduces new and unrelated conditions not laid down by either the Constitution or the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1950.
“The impugned SIR order requires the inclusion or retention of a voter’s name in the electoral roll upon production of citizenship documents, including proof of citizenship of either or both the parents, failing which the voter is at risk of exclusion. This requirement is ultra vires Article 326 and introduces extraneous qualifications not contemplated by the Constitution or the RP Act 1950.”
The petition also highlights that under the current laws—particularly Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules (RER), 1960 and Form 7 read with Rule 13—only an
“Application for objecting inclusion or seeking deletion of name in electoral roll”
can be used for changes to the list. Therefore, requiring people to furnish fresh documents to prove citizenship goes beyond what the law allows.
Previously, the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), a well-known election monitoring NGO, had also approached the Supreme Court against the same ECI order.
ADR, through its lawyer Advocate Prashant Bhushan, stated that the EC’s order “can arbitrarily and without due process” remove lakhs of legitimate voters from the rolls. Bhushan pointed out that the order not only lacks proper procedure but also has an “unreasonably short timeline” for implementation.
He warned:
“That the documentation requirements of the directive, lack of due process as well as the unreasonably short timeline for the said Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Roll in Bihar further make this exercise bound to result in removal of names of lakhs of genuine voters from electoral rolls leading to their disenfranchisement.”
Meanwhile, the Election Commission defended its decision, saying that Bihar needed the Special Intensive Revision due to several reasons—rapid urbanisation, increased migration, a large number of new young voters, deaths not being reported on time, and illegal foreign immigrants being included in the rolls.
The EC said the main goal of the SIR is to ensure only eligible citizens are on the rolls and to protect the
“integrity and accuracy of the electoral roll.”
The Commission has instructed booth-level officers to go house-to-house for voter verification. It also stated that the process is being conducted strictly according to legal and constitutional guidelines.
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