Published Oct 01, 2026 | 7:00 PM ⚊ Updated Oct 01, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Logo of Election Commission of India
Synopsis: With over two-thirds of electors in the latest draft rolls receiving notices over anomalies, discrepencies, and mapping issues in Telangana, concerns are being raised about the process employed to flag the voters in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Activist SQ Masood has approached the Telangana High Court, alleging that a software is behind the unprecedented scale of notices in the State.
Hyderabad-based activist SQ Masood has moved the Telangana High Court against the Election Commission of India’s ERONET platform, alleging that the software, and not electoral officers, is deciding which voters get notices as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
Masood and his brother Syed Waheed Uddin filed the writ petition on Tuesday, 29 September, naming the ECI, the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Telangana, and the GHMC Commissioner, who is Hyderabad’s District Election Officer, as respondents.
The petitioners sought directions declaring illegal the automated process that flagged voters for minor discrepancies without human oversight and without publicising the software’s functioning. They argued such processes violated Articles 14, 19(1)(a), and 21 of the Indian Constitution, the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.
Also Read: How Hyderabad Police justified facial recognition surveillance
Masood told South First that the ongoing data collection under SIR amounted to voter profiling.
“Issuing notices through algorithms, without application of mind and without the involvement of the ERO, the statutory authority at the local level, is illegal, unjust and contrary to the prescribed regulations. Collecting voters’ family details along with Aadhaar and other personal information for mapping also violates the right to privacy and liberty recognised in the Puttaswamy judgment. The Supreme Court has mandated a legal basis and adequate safeguards for excessive State data collection,” he added.
The petition, registered on 30 September, was yet to be listed for hearing.
Masood and Waheed Uddin said they were flagged because their late father’s name did not match the 2002 roll, the last intensive revision in Telangana. Waheed Uddin received a formal notice after the enumeration phase, while Masood got a call from a Booth Level Officer (BLO) asking him to submit documents for verification.
The notice reportedly said the discrepancy was found “after scrutiny”, but the petitioners contend that no human officer had ever scrutinised their records. Instead, they said, notices were mechanically generated by an ‘automated data-matching platform’ within the ECI’s ECINet/ ERONET system.
The petition argued that automated software flagged discrepancies and anomalies based on minute mismatches in the records. Despite enumeration forms containing all the required details of voters, notices were issued without proper verification by local election officials, the petitioners alleged.
Voters in the petitioners’ family were earlier deleted from the rolls and had approached the Telangana High Court. Upon instructions from the court and the Telangana CEO, they had applied for registration via Form 6 and a signed declaration, but said they were shocked to still receive notices.
The petitioners maintained that the major flaw was in the baseline data itself, as the software relied on the 2002 records which were originally in Telugu and later translated and typed into English by data entry operators. This process introduced large-scale clerical and typographical errors, such as misspelling the petitioners’ father’s name “Syed Sadruddin” as “Syed Sardar”.
The petitioners argued that by using an unverified, 20-year-old database as the benchmark, the system automatically flagged valid electors. They raised concerns that registered electors who had voted for decades were being subjected to verification proceedings, thus shifting the burden of proof onto citizens.
Also Read: Muslim names comprise over 40% of voters left off
The petition highlighted official figures shared by the Telangana CEO’s office, showing that 60.5 lakh electors were flagged for anomalies, and another 32.4 lakh were categorised as unmapped or wrongly mapped to the 2002 roll. That is nearly 93 lakh voters, more than a quarter of the 3.38 crore electors whose forms were digitised.
The petitioners flagged a lack of transparency in the procedure after claims and objections hearings. BLOs upload the documents a voter brings into a mobile app, with no room for a written explanation. The portal afterwards shows only “Record Updated Successfully”. Voters receive no written acknowledgement, no status tracking, and no way to know whether election officials accepted or rejected their documents.
Under Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, an ERO must inquire, record reasons, give notice, hear the voter, and pass an order before removing an entry. The petition says ERONET does the real work of targeting voters, bypassing that inquiry, and that no law or manual authorises it.
The petition invoked the Supreme Court of India’s directions in Association for Democratic Reforms v. ECI (2026), which permitted the SIR exercise only under strict conditions. The apex court mandated that principles of natural justice must be upheld and that the local officials such as EROs, AEROs, and BLOs are responsible for it. This required the officials to hold an enquiry in cases of doubt, verify on the ground and pass a speaking order, which machine-generated flags cannot replace.
The petition cited the landmark Puttaswamy judgment, and contended that automated profiling of family trees and data-matching without explicit statutory authorisation violated fundamental rights guaranteed under Articles 14, 19(1)(a), and 21 of the Constitution.
Citing research that found Muslim voters were disproportionately hit by logical discrepancy flags in West Bengal SIR, the petition raised similar concerns about constituencies in Telangana. Petitioners also expressed concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in the SIR process and submitted that technology cannot replace statutory oversight.
Also Read: SIR and denying the citizenship rights of minorities
The petition sought a writ of mandamus to declare ERONET-generated notices, issued without checking physical records or ERO application of mind, illegal and violative of Articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 21, and halt proceedings based solely on them. It requested directions for the ECI, CEO, and the GHMC Commissioner to stop exclusion or deletion based solely on ERONET, unless an ERO has verified physical records and passed a speaking order after hearing the voter.
The petition also sought the disclosure of the exact discrepancy, the documents recorded, and their status to all the voters who received notices and attended hearings. It called for the ECI to place on record and publicly disclose the complete system architecture, underlying algorithms, operational manuals, security audit reports, and other relevant documents of ECINet/ ERONET, within a week.
Also Read: SIR is disenfranchising the marginalised
The petition came amid a wider row over the ERONET software. It cited an Indian Express report exposing Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu’s objections about restricted ERONET access for state officials.
Reports suggested that Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was behind the deployment of the software, although the Union government has not officially acknowledged it.
In an X post on Thursday about the controversial Form 6 declaration, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi alleged that the Form was changed illegally. Directly naming the firm, Gandhi asked, “Who at the ECI ordered Tata Consultancy Services to make that change? Who at TCS signed off on it?”
Speaking to South First, activist and cybersecurity researcher Srinivas Kodali said, “With the help of software, laws and rules are being changed continuously, whimsically, with impulse, as seen in the case of Form-6 modification.”
“Laws are being replaced with unauthorised code that is not transparent. All electoral processes need to be transparent to instil trust in the election procedures. But software systems are closed, giving us a black-box democracy,” he added.
(Edited by Majnu Babu).
