Bombay High Court says draft voter roll cannot justify deletions without hearing

The Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court has said that a draft electoral roll cannot be used as the basis for deleting voters’ names, warning that administrative software cannot replace statutory procedures. The Division Bench of Justice Amit S. Jamsandekar and Justice Valmiki Menezes also questioned the Election Commission of India over provisions that might allow names to be deleted without a hearing.

The judges said they were “very perturbed” by the issue. The court was hearing a petition filed by six members of a family whose names had been removed from the voter list. The family had moved to a new house within the same Santa Cruz Assembly constituency and had been instructed to submit Form 8 to change its address.

The petitioners said the Electoral Registration Officers’ Network, or ERONET, showed no record of their Electors Photo Identity Cards. The only available option was to reject their applications. They were later informed that their EPIC records had been deleted, leaving Form 6 as the apparent route to restoration.

The family argued that Form 6 was meant for first-time inclusion, whereas they were existing voters seeking an address change and should have used Form 8. The Bench said the forms had distinct purposes and that an existing voter should not become a new voter merely because the software could not process the application. It told the Election Commission that receiving Form 8 required officials to examine whether the person had genuinely moved.

The judges asked the Commission to identify the legal authority for deleting names without a hearing. They criticised officials for relying on the system’s rejection and warned that similar procedures could remove large numbers of citizens from electoral rolls. The ruling places emphasis on human review and legal safeguards when voter records are changed or deleted.