Kolkata: Twenty-six-year-old Sahinura Begum resides in Part 34 of the Raiganj assembly constituency in Uttar Dinajpur. When the Election Commission of India (ECI) published its final electoral roll for West Bengal on February 28 this year, at the close of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), her name carried the words ‘Under Adjudication’.Her file went to a judicial officer. On March 27, her name appeared in the second supplementary list, cleared and back on the roll. But at 1.43 pm on April 2, an appeal was registered. She did not file it. It was filed against her.The record remains visible on the Election Commission voter service portal, where every citizen can log in and see their records and applications. Her appeal identity from April is APS25XXXXXXXX332, the digital form identifies the target. In the field labelled ‘Appeal Against EPIC No’ is Sahinura Begum’s voter identification number, starting with UXO157. The system log is brief. The first entry reads ‘Pending’. The second, stamped at 4.33 pm on April 18, finally brings relief. It reads ‘Included in E-roll’.The tribunal ultimately refused to strike her name off the rolls. When the April 21 supplementary list was published following the April 13 Supreme Court directive, she appeared at serial 5XX. A footnote confirmed her name was already on the previously published roll.Sahinura Begum was forced to prove her citizenship twice. The second ordeal was entirely manufactured by an anonymous actor who wanted the first clearance revoked. Six days separated her initial relief from the sudden appeal against her. Another 11 days passed between that appeal and the moment the appellate tribunals finally began operations.Who filed this appeal and why? These questions are no longer confined to one voter in Raiganj.Sixteen lakh appeals against inclusionSahinura Begum’s case belongs to a category the ECI disclosed to the Supreme Court for the first time on September 16 this year.Responding to MP Derek O’Brien’s application in the Supreme Court, the Election Commission broke down the mathematics of the electoral tribunals. Out of 38,31,429 total appeals filed, 22,21,118 came from voters fighting their own exclusion. But a staggering 16,10,311 were appeals made against someone else’s inclusion. In simpler words, these were petitions filed specifically to strike someone else off the voter list.A BLO The Wire spoke to said, requesting anonymity, “An OTP system has been introduced to check the appeal status. Voters whose names were excluded and who have filed an appeal will be able to view the status of their appeal only after entering the OTP sent to the phone number from which they filed the appeal. Meanwhile, for voters whose names were included but against whom an appeal has been filed, the status is currently showing an error message.”The scale of these objections becomes stark when weighed against the prior judicial review. In February 2026, the Supreme Court took the final revision out of the Election Commission’s hands. The court placed 60,06,675 electors flagged for logical discrepancies before its own chosen judicial officers. Those officers disqualified 27,28,500 voters. They examined the remaining 32,77,360 individuals and legally cleared them to stay on the roll.Sahanura Begum’s journey as a voter in this SIR. Note: The above is a GIF of five images.The 16,10,311 appeals against inclusion represent 49.1% of everyone those judicial officers had cleared. This equates to roughly one formal objection for every two people a judge had already evaluated and protected on the rolls. No notification to those facing appeals against exclusionAnyone appealing to the Election Commission receives a digital or physical receipt of the appeal. This directs the voter’s next legal move. Citizens asking for their own removal from the rolls receive a detailed acknowledgement which logs the appeal number, the exact filing timestamp, the legal grounds, and a digitally signed declaration under the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The form also features a specific field for the target of the appeal. For a standard restoration request, the voter’s own name appears there and they receive a receipt against the request.When a third-party files an objection, the targeted voter’s name is to be entered in that field. The critical difference is that the targeted voter receives absolutely no communication.This is the reality at present for 16,10,311 electors across Bengal, representing 2.50% of the final rolls. Each of these individuals is named in an active application designed to strike them off. The applicant walks away with a numbered, dated, digitally signed legal document. The person targeted receives nothing. Most have no reason to suspect their voting rights are pending adjudication at all.The consequence is strictly procedural. Thus, an elector unaware of an appeal might not be able to file a defence, submit documents, attend a hearing, or hire representation at all. The question an Election Commissioner asked, and could not get answeredThe Election Commission did not voluntarily supply the 1,610,311 figures. The Supreme Court directive of August 25 only asked the poll panel to detail pending appeals, decided appeals, and appeals filed by excluded voters seeking restoration. The Commission answered those three queries and added the mass objections line. Crucially, the affidavit did not reveal who actually filed them.That omission was already the subject of an internal institutional war, we know now. The Indian Express on Wednesday reported on a series of 14 dissenting notes authored by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi between October 2025 and August 2026. On August 12, Sandhu wrote to commission officials demanding to know who authorised appeals on behalf of the Commission before the West Bengal tribunals. According to the report, Sandhu recorded that neither he, nor Joshi, nor the serving Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal knew anything about the basis or the process of these filings.The timeline exposes the depth of the crisis. Sandhu demanded answers internally on August 12. Five months earlier, in an April 13 order, the bench noted that over 34 lakh appeals had already flooded the system, driven not just by wrongful exclusions but by objectors systematically challenging the inclusion of cleared voters. The same report lists a set of dissenting notes describes a digital apparatus that the Commissioners themselves admit they could not penetrate.On April 16, 2026, a mere three days after the tribunals began their work, Commissioner Sandhu formally recorded that he was learning about new IT modules and portals entirely through media reports. By May 29, Commissioner Joshi raised alarms that the electoral roll database was being aggressively centralised and demanded an immediate audit. Sandhu endorsed that warning on July 13. By August 14, Sandhu documented a critical system failure. Field officers were entirely blocked from accessing the ECI Net system, and the Director General for Information Technology claimed he possessed no authority to restrict or restore their access.Queries were sent to the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal. No response had been received at the time of publication.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.A series on how the adjudication process of the Special Intensive Revision in West Bengal continues in Bengal unfurls this truth. Read part one, here, part two, here, and part three, here, part four, here, and part five, here.