New Delhi: The Election Commission (EC) may have “acted wholly without authority of law” in adding a special intensive revision (SIR)-related section to its online form for enrolling new electors, Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas has cautioned, urging the poll body to immediately withdraw the new section.New electors can enroll themselves using Form 6, the online edition of which now asks applicants to declare whether they, their parents or grandparents appear in the voter rolls created after the last SIR, even as the downloadable version of the form does not ask for this information.Although changes to Form 6 ordinarily require a parliamentary amendment to the 1950 Representation of the People Act or to its associated rules, no such change was made to support the addition of the SIR declaration, the Indian Express‘s Damini Nath had reported on Sunday.“If this is indeed the position, the Commission has acted wholly without authority of law,” Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP for Kerala Brittas said in a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in a letter on Monday (July 13), expressing his “profound concern” over the development.Wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner @ECISVEEP challenging the legality of the Election Commission’s introduction of a ‘new mandatory declaration’ in the online Form 6 for voter registration through the ECINET portal.This is not merely a technical change. It is a serious… pic.twitter.com/wAtyskBBV2— John Brittas (@JohnBrittas) July 13, 2026Article 324 of the Constitution confers a wide range of powers on the EC to prepare voter rolls and conduct elections, but it “cannot be invoked to rewrite statutory rules or to assume powers that parliament has expressly entrusted elsewhere”, Brittas argued. He called the operationalisation of the new declaration – without which the online form cannot be completed – sans an amendment as “plainly ultra vires”.Noting that the offline version of Form 6 does not contain the SIR declaration, Brittas added that “citizens similarly situated cannot be subjected to different legal obligations merely because one chooses a digital platform while another files a physical application”. That would violate the fundamental right to equality before the law, the parliamentarian said.“Millions of first-time voters, students, migrant workers, internally displaced persons, adopted children, orphans, persons estranged from their families and citizens whose parents or grandparents have migrated across constituencies over several decades may have no practical means of furnishing legacy electoral particulars,” he wrote, recalling also that electoral rolls prepared after the 2002-3 SIRs may not be readily accessible.Brittas urged the EC to immediately withdraw the SIR section and direct that no forms be rejected, kept pending or marked incomplete just because “this unauthorised declaration” is absent.“Should the Commission consider such a declaration necessary in public interest, the proper constitutional course is to recommend amendment of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, through the competent authority in accordance with Section 28 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950,” he pointed out.An unnamed EC official speaking to PTI on Sunday said that the commission added the SIR declaration ‘through instructions’ and that Form 6 was not amended at all. “It helps in mapping electors and reduces the documents new voters need to submit along with the application,” the news agency quoted the official as saying.The declaration’s addition comes even as the EC’s conduct of the SIR has been highly contentious, especially in West Bengal, where some 27 lakh electors were unable to vote in the April assembly elections for the unprecedented reason that the tribunals meant to adjudicate on their pleas for registration were not given enough time.