New Delhi: Following an explosive investigation by The Indian Express into the functioning of the Election Commission of India, the Commission held a meeting on Saturday, September 26. Reporter Ritika Chopra, who broke the story that two Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had recorded objections at least 14 times to decisions taken by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar touching the core of the Commission’s mandate, points to some of the crucial points missing from the ECI’s new decisions.The ECI on Saturday issued a four-page note after Kumar, Sandhu and Joshi met. The note says agendas will now be circulated before every Commission meeting and minutes issued afterwards. Officers’ foreign trips will need Commission approval. New IT modules and portals will go through a committee of officers before being placed before the Commission. The ECINet will be reviewed by a committee headed by a senior Deputy Election Commissioner and will include an independent expert from an IIT or IIIT. If field officers need more flexibility in the system, it will be provided. And directions issued by Commissioners to officers will be “meticulously complied with.”These decisions, The Indian Express points out, map “almost item for item, onto the concerns the two Commissioners had put on file over 10 months.”In Goa, where The Indian Express found 97 voters cleared by local officers still missing from the final roll, the Commission says 81 have now filled Form 6 and the CEO has been directed to facilitate their inclusion. This sharp turn, the Express says, “signals how deep the disquiet inside the Commission had become, and how far it had travelled outside, with Opposition parties by Friday demanding that polls on SIR rolls be cancelled.”Chopra writes that Joshi’s May objection had specifically pointed to the insertion of a question between sections J and K, where a question on the applicant’s parents was added, and which would not let an applicant proceed without answering it. The note issued by the ECI does not mention the online form, or the question, or say whether it has been removed. “It (the note) says the Supreme Court ‘upheld’ the declaration, which the court’s May 27 order on the SIR does not appear to do in terms. And it does not say who put the question there in July, or why it stayed after Sandhu called it ‘unauthorised/illegal’ on August 13,” the report notes.Other questions, the report points out, have gone “unanswered” too. “The note says nothing about the central one from West Bengal: who authorised the appeals filed against voters whose inclusion had been ordered by judicial officers, and were they filed on behalf of ECI and if yes, who was it authorised by? It does not explain why Goa’s requested software facility to restore voter names was never enabled. And it does not say whether DG (IT) Seema Khanna, whose functioning was a point of contention, and Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg, against whom both Commissioners sought action, will stay,” Chopra points out in her piece.