Restoring Votes After the Votes Are Cast: Bengal’s SIR Tribunals Allow 61.5% Appeals Back Into Voter Rolls

The numbers tell a damning story. Nearly 25 lakh people filed appeals after their names were wiped from West Bengal’s electoral rolls. As of May 14 , only 6,581 cases , a mere 0.26 per cent , had been disposed of by the 19 appellate tribunals constituted to hear them. More striking still, of those cases decided, 61.5 per cent were allowed , meaning those voters’ names were confirmed as wrongly deleted and reinstated. The question that haunts this exercise is simple and devastating: where were these verdicts in April, when the elections were actually held?

Ahead of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections , nearly 91 lakh voters were deleted from the state’s electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision , a combination of around 63 lakh names removed earlier and an additional 27 lakh declared ineligible after judicial adjudication. The Election Commission insisted it was a long overdue clean up, targeting duplicates, the deceased, and those who had shifted residence. But the scale was staggering, and the pace of correction has been glacial .

West Bengal’s Chief Electoral Officer made clear the stakes: voters whose names were deleted would not be able to vote in the election. If their appeals were cleared by a tribunal, their names would be enrolled again for future elections. The Supreme Court did attempt a last minute remedy, ordering that voters whose appeals were cleared by April 21 or April 27, two days before each phase of polling, could be included in a supplementary roll. But with tribunals barely operational and the mere pendency of appeals not entitling anyone to vote, millions were effectively frozen out .

TMC MP Derek O’Brien had moved the Supreme Court as early as January, alleging that over 58 lakh names were deleted without any notice or personal hearing, a claim the Election Commission dismissed as exaggerated and politically motivated. Yet the tribunal data now vindicates the alarm. In Murshidabad and Malda , two districts that saw the highest deletions, Murshidabad saw only 112 appeals disposed of out of 6.29 lakh filed , while Malda recorded just 185 disposals against 5.26 lakh pleas .

Critics and legal observers argue that massive errors of judgment left lakhs of genuine voters without the right to vote. What we are now witnessing is an institution quietly correcting those errors after the ballot has already been cast, after the results have been declared, after the government has been formed. Sixty two per cent of heard appeals being allowed is not a vindication of due process. It is an indictment of what passed for one.