The Election Commission’s press note of September 26 is unusual. On the surface, it announces a series of sensible administrative improvements: Booth Level Officers (BLOs) will visit voters at home, special camps will help the homeless and vulnerable, ECINet will undergo an expert review, new IT modules will receive institutional scrutiny, agendas will be circulated before commission meetings, minutes will be issued afterwards and directions given by Election Commissioners will be “meticulously complied with”.All this belated wisdom is welcome.But read in the light of the disclosures of the preceding week, the press note raises an unavoidable question: how many of these are genuinely new reforms, and how many are restorations of safeguards that should have existed all along?Take the first announcement. Persons issued notices for being “unmapped” or having “logical discrepancies” will no longer ordinarily have to appear before the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO). BLOs will visit their homes, instead, collect their documents and upload them on the ECINet digital system.This certainly reduces inconvenience. But it does not address the real difficulty.House-to-house visits are not a new feature for the Election Commission. During Special Intensive Revision (SIR) itself, BLOs were required to visit households repeatedly for distribution and collection of enumeration forms. The commission stated in November 2025 that BLOs would make at least three house-to-house visits.Also read: West Bengal Voter Challenges Traced to Centralised Batch System, Records ShowThe problem was never principally the distance between the citizen and the ERO’s office. The problem was the documentary burden. A voter who cannot produce the required document is not helped merely because the demand is now made at her doorstep. The burden has merely moved from the ERO’s office to the voter’s home.The press release issued by the Election Commission of India on Saturday, September 26. ECI.gov.inNor is the controversy around “logical discrepancies” a minor matter. The Supreme Court has recently sought the commission’s response after questions were raised about apparently mechanical notices in Delhi and the basis on which such discrepancies were being generated.The announcement of special camps for homeless persons, labourers and those living in night shelters shows that their existence is finally recognised. But precisely because these are the citizens least likely to possess documentary records, the real test will be whether the camps facilitate inclusion rather than merely provide another venue at which documents must be produced.The most serious issue, however, concerns statutory authority.Section 13B of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 says that the electoral roll “shall be prepared and revised” by the Electoral Registration Officer. The Election Commission unquestionably has constitutional and supervisory powers, but Parliament has deliberately vested the preparation and revision of the individual constituency roll in a statutory officer.Goa shows why this matters.According to The Indian Express, 97 electors were found eligible after scrutiny by the EROs and AEROs concerned. Yet the software controlled from Delhi did not provide the rollback facility necessary to restore their names. Goa officials reportedly wrote eight times in seven days seeking the facility. It was not enabled before publication of the final roll, and the 97 remained outside it.The commission now tells us that 81 of these 97 have filled Form 6.But that is hardly an answer. These were not citizens whose eligibility had never been examined. Their cases had already been reconsidered and they had reportedly been found eligible by the statutory authorities. Why should a deficiency in computer software require them to begin the process again? The legal question is stark: can centrally controlled software prevent a statutory ERO from giving effect to his lawful decision?Technology must implement the law. It cannot acquire a veto over it.That makes the commission’s decision to appoint an expert committee to review ECINet especially revealing. The press note says the committee will “double-check” whether ECINet complies with the Acts and Rules, and that any additional flexibility required by field officers will be provided. It also says future IT modules and portals will first be discussed by a committee of officers.These measures were always necessary. But why are we “double-checking” statutory compliance after the system has already been used for electoral-roll revision across most of India?Form 6 raises another question.Rule 13 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 prescribes Form 6 for claims for inclusion in the electoral roll. This has worked for more than six decades. The commission says the Form itself was not altered; an additional SIR declaration was attached, and it relies on the Supreme Court judgment of May 27 upholding the SIR framework.Also read: Election Commission Says Supreme Court ‘Upheld’ Form 6 Changes, But Did It?That judgment is important and must be fairly acknowledged. The court upheld the commission’s authority to conduct SIR under Article 324 and Section 21(3), and the judgment itself records the requirement of Form 6 together with the separate declaration.But that does not dispose of the different controversy revealed by the commissioners’ own notes: the insertion of a compulsory parents-related question into the online Form 6 workflow.The September 26 press note does not say whether that online requirement has been removed, who authorised its introduction, or how precisely it related to the statutory Form 6 and the separate declaration prescribed for SIR.More importantly, if two Election Commissioners objected to the digital implementation, by whose authority was it nevertheless introduced or continued?Then come two seemingly mundane announcements: henceforth, agendas will be circulated before commission meetings and minutes will be issued; and directions of Election Commissioners to officers will be meticulously followed.The Indian Express investigation reported that commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had recorded objections at least 14 times over ten months concerning registration, deletion and restoration of voters, Form 6, appeals and control of the electoral database.If agendas and minutes will now become routine, the obvious question is: what was the procedure earlier?If commissioners’ directions will henceforth be meticulously complied with, what happened to directions issued earlier?The commission emphasises that the original SIR orders and subsequent schedules had the unanimous approval of all three commissioners. That is important and answers one issue: the broad decision to conduct SIR was not a unilateral act.But it does not answer a different question: Were all the subsequent decisions taken in implementing SIR also authorised by the full commission?Nowhere is that silence more striking than in West Bengal. Of 38.31 lakh appeals before the tribunals, 22.21 lakh were filed by deleted voters seeking restoration; another 16.10 lakh sought deletion of persons who had been included.Sandhu reportedly asked who was authorised to file those appeals “on behalf of ECI” and who actually filed them.Also read: It Is Still the Election Commission of India, Not the Gyanesh Kumar CommissionThere is another equally important question: who supplied the names of voters whose inclusion was then challenged?A complete break-up of these appeals – including who initiated them, on whose authority, on what evidence and through what process – is essential to understand what happened.That, finally, is the problem with the press note. It contains several welcome correctives. But a corrective is not the same thing as an explanation.Indeed, the very need for these correctives implicitly acknowledges that important safeguards were not functioning as they should have been.The outstanding questions are straightforward. Who authorised the disputed decisions? Was the statutory authority of the ERO preserved? Why could software frustrate an ERO’s decision? Who altered or supplemented digital procedures? Who authorised appeals in the commission’s name? Which decisions, if any, were taken without the authority of the full commission, and what is their legal status? And what remedy exists for citizens already excluded because of these failures?The Election Commission is too important an institution for these questions to remain buried in files.The computer must serve the law. It cannot become the law. And institutional confidence is restored not merely by promising better procedures tomorrow, but by explaining what happened yesterday.S.Y. Quraishi is former Chief Election Commissioner of India and the author of An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.