New Delhi: Even as the names of thousands of voters got deleted from electoral rolls during the phase 2 and 3 of the Special Intensive Revision through auto-generated Form 7s digitally signed by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), it has been found that state election authorities are carrying out this procedure without any written protocol or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) issued by the Election Commission of India (ECI), reported The Hindu.Form 7 is used to seek the deletion of a name from the electoral roll.Despite the fact that there is no provision for EROs or Assistant EROs (AEROs) to file Form 7 themselves under electoral rules, poll officials in states such as Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal have auto-generated forms with their digital signatures to remove names from rolls for unresolved logical discrepancies and in cases of voters found to be “unmapped”.The ECI was yet to respond to an official query in the matter, reported The Hindu.The report in The Hindu added citing several state electoral officials that the ECI’s software, ERONet, automatically generated these Form 7s when officials deleted voters during the SIR hearings.Earlier, The Wire had reported that the Congress party in Uttarakhand had alleged that the deletion requests in the state were auto-generated to flag minor errors and also worked selectively across the state’s districts to put its voters at a disadvantage. That is, the Election Commission’s ERONET software flags minor name mismatches, differences in the age of siblings or between parents and children as well as parents with more than six children as a “logical discrepancy.More than 95,000 of the nearly 1.73 lakh Form 7 applications filed during the SIR of electoral rolls in Uttarakhand have been marked as “ineligible”.As per to the Manual on Electoral Rolls, 2024, there is no provision for the ERO to file a Form 7. The ERO who is the adjudicator in the process can delete a name found ineligible.According to the rules, a Form 7 can be filed only by a person whose name is already included in the roll in which the name objected to appears.Earlier, after facing severe criticism over bulk Form 7s being filed, the ECI on October 9 had limited the number of applications that can be submitted by an individual to 10 applications.The ECI has faced growing criticism over not being able to check the number of Form 7s being filed, and for failing to reveal the source of these filings.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.