India's Election Commission (ECI) is facing a credibility crisis on two fronts: a damning account from West Bengal, where judicial officers say they warned the commission months in advance about crippling technical failures that went unaddressed, and a sharp rebuke from the Supreme Court over the commission's use of a modified version of Form 6 that was never formally notified. Together, the episodes raise uncomfortable questions about whether India's premier electoral authority is managing its own processes with the rigor the world's largest democracy demands.

Warnings Ignored in West Bengal

According to a report, judges presiding over roughly a dozen election tribunals in West Bengal alerted the ECI months ago that its portal was riddled with basic functional failures. The portal, these judges said, could not add or delete voters' names, could not issue notices, and could not even serve as a functioning meeting platform, failures that strike at the heart of the electoral roll revision process.

Despite these specific and repeated warnings from officials embedded within the system, the tribunal judges say nothing was done to fix the problems. The silence is striking given the stakes: electoral rolls are the foundational document of Indian democracy, determining who is eligible to vote and who is not. A portal unable to perform the most elementary functions of adding or removing names is not a minor inconvenience; it is a structural failure that can disenfranchise voters or leave rolls inaccurate at a moment when trust in the process is already strained.

That the warnings came from judges sitting on tribunals, not outside critics or political opponents, makes the ECI's inaction harder to explain. These are officials whose job is precisely to adjudicate disputes over the electoral rolls; their inability to do so because of a malfunctioning portal represents a breakdown at the operational core of the commission's own machinery.

The Supreme Court's Rebuke

The second front concerns Form 6, the document used by citizens to register as new voters or to correct entries in the electoral rolls. The Supreme Court, in examining the ECI's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, scrutinized documentation the commission submitted from June 2025 when it approved the SIR process. That documentation, however, did not reflect the tweaked, online version of Form 6 that the ECI has since put into use, a version that still has not been formally notified.

In effect, the court found a gap between what the ECI told it was being approved and what has actually been deployed in practice. A form central to voter registration and correction, modified without the formal notification that would normally accompany such a change, undercuts the transparency the commission is expected to maintain. Notification is not a bureaucratic formality; it is the mechanism by which the public and the courts can verify that electoral procedures match what has been legally sanctioned.

The juxtaposition of an unnotified form change with a portal that the commission's own tribunal judges say has been malfunctioning for months paints a picture of an institution struggling to keep its procedural house in order even as it undertakes one of its most consequential tasks: revising the rolls that determine electoral participation.

Why This Matters

India's Election Commission has historically been regarded as a robust, independent institution, one of the pillars that has allowed Indian democracy to function at a scale unmatched anywhere in the world. That reputation rests on the assumption that the commission's internal processes, from the software that manages voter rolls to the forms citizens use to register, are reliable and transparently governed.

The West Bengal tribunals' account suggests that assumption may not hold in practice. If judges tasked with resolving roll disputes could not even open notices or process name changes because of portal failures, and if those failures were flagged and ignored for months, the implications extend well beyond West Bengal. The Special Intensive Revision process is being watched closely nationwide, and any indication that its technical backbone is unreliable, or that its paperwork does not match what courts were told, invites scrutiny of the exercise's integrity more broadly.

The Supreme Court's finding adds a layer of institutional accountability: it is not only civil society or journalists raising questions about the SIR process, but the judiciary itself identifying a discrepancy between the ECI's representations and its actions. Taken together, these developments suggest that the ECI's management of the current roll revision exercise warrants closer, sustained oversight, not only from the courts but from the public whose franchise depends on the integrity of these rolls.