The Supreme Court judgement on May 27 giving its stamp of approval to the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar marked a sharp departure from the enumeration exercises in the decades after Independence, in which people defined the voter rolls and not the other way around.

The court held that the special intensive revision in Bihar is constitutional and that the procedures undertaken by the Election Commission of India do not violate any election laws.

Historically, in India, if there were doubts about a person’s citizenship, the burden of proving this has always been on the state – not on the voter.

With this judgement, the Election Commission will now get to choose who gets to be on the electoral roll, despite citizens already having voted in the previous elections.

The Election Commission conducted a special intensive revision of the rolls in Bihar between July and September 2025 to delete the names of voters who have died or who have migrated, as well as to exclude the “names of foreign illegal immigrants”. The exercise has since been expanded to states across the country.

The exercise has proved to be controversial. In July 2025, the Association for Democratic Reforms took the Election Commission to court, contending that the commission did...

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