Election Commission in 2025: A year of roll purification and rising scrutiny

If 2024 was about managing the scale of India’s general election, 2025 became the year the Election Commission of India (ECI) was tested on trust. The institution found itself at the centre of political, legal and civil society debates, not over polling day mechanics, but over a more fundamental question—who gets to remain on the voter list, and at what cost?

At the heart of this churn was the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, rolled out across multiple states as the ECI sought to update, clean and purify voter databases ahead of a packed electoral calendar. Officially, the exercise was framed as routine housekeeping removing duplicates, correcting errors, updating addresses, and ensuring demographic accuracy. In practice, it became the most consequential intervention by the ECI in recent years.

Across states such as Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, the SIR process led to large-scale deletions and modifications, running into lakhs. The Commission highlighted these numbers as proof that outdated, inflated or inaccurate rolls were finally being corrected. But opposition parties and rights groups saw a different picture of potential disenfranchisement, particularly of migrant workers, urban poor, minorities and first-time voters whose documentation did not neatly align with official records.

The political backlash was swift. In Bihar and West Bengal especially, opposition leaders accused the ECI of shifting the burden of proof onto voters, compelling them to repeatedly establish eligibility. The Commission pushed back, arguing that claims, objections and appeals mechanisms were firmly in place, and that no eligible voter would be excluded without due process. Courts, too, were drawn in, not to halt the exercise, but to demand procedural fairness and restraint where technological or administrative errors were evident.

Technology was both the ECI’s strongest defence and its biggest vulnerability in 2025. The Commission leaned heavily on digital capture of forms, centralised databases, SMS-based voter verification services and platforms like ECINET, projecting efficiency and transparency. In some states, officials claimed near-total digitisation of electoral rolls. Yet, glitches in voter mapping, data mismatches and incorrect tagging of electors exposed the limits of tech-led governance in a country as vast and unequal as India. In several instances, the ECI had to step in to clarify that voters affected by system errors would not be penalised, a tacit acknowledgement that technology, while powerful, is not neutral.

Leadership also mattered. Gyanesh Kumar’s appointment as Chief Election Commissioner in early 2025 came at a moment when the institution needed both administrative firmness and political sensitivity. His tenure so far has been marked by a push for predictability, internal standardisation and outreach but also by a willingness to defend the Commission robustly against accusations of bias. The ECI in 2025 was less defensive than in previous years, more inclined to explain its processes publicly, yet equally determined not to yield ground on institutional authority.

Alongside roll revision, the Commission conducted several important electoral exercises, including the Delhi Assembly election, which saw a major political shift, and a series of Rajya Sabha and constitutional elections.

That distinction will matter enormously in 2026, which is shaping up to be one of the most politically sensitive years for the ECI in the current cycle. Assembly elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry will place the finalised electoral rolls shaped by the SIR process directly under the microscope. Every deletion, correction and inclusion made in 2025 will be politically litigated in 2026.

The challenge for the ECI will be twofold. First, it must ensure that final electoral rolls inspire confidence across party lines, not merely satisfy internal benchmarks. Second, it must communicate clearly and consistently that roll integrity and voter inclusion are not competing goals.

In that sense, 2025 may be remembered as a hinge year for the ECI—one that forced it to redefine the balance between administrative precision and democratic empathy. What happens in 2026 will determine whether the SIR era is seen as a necessary correction, or as a cautionary tale. For an institution built on public trust rather than coercive power, that verdict will matter more than any statistic.