New Delhi: The Election Commission of India (EC) has removed a contentious Special Intensive Revision (SIR) declaration clause from its online Form 6 voter registration portal across states where the revision process has officially concluded.

The technical rollback on the ECINET application portal comes four days after the Commission announced on September 26 that standard statutory forms prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, would be used during non-SIR periods.

 

Objections raised over statutory compliance

The corrective action follows internal dissent within the poll body. Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally raised objections regarding the addition of the extra declaration field inside the statutory Form 6 without formal statutory amendments.

Under the Representation of the People Act, 1950, statutory forms governing voter registration, deletion and corrections fall under the sole jurisdiction of the Union Law Ministry, meaning the Commission cannot unilaterally amend them.

 

Discrepancy between online application and downloadable forms

The procedural controversy surfaced when the online portal inserted a custom declaration section between Sections J and K of the digital Form 6. The prompt required applicants to specify whether they, their parents or their grandparents were listed in previous SIR rolls, requiring booth and serial numbers where applicable.

However, the downloadable PDF version of Form 6 hosted on the primary EC website lacked this requirement. While a supplementary declaration form was issued separately during the 2025 Bihar SIR drive, the statutory Form 6 itself was never legally amended to incorporate the fields.

Following the system modification on Wednesday night, the contested declaration has been scrubbed from the portal for states with published final SIR rolls, while remaining visible only in jurisdictions where revision operations are actively ongoing.