New Delhi: Congress MP Jairam Ramesh on Thursday (October 22) said that ‘vote chori (theft)’ is a proven reality.“Vote chori is a proven reality. According to the ECI’s own data, over ten crore Indians face the risk of losing their constitutional right to vote,” Ramesh said.He added, “The ECI [Election Commission of India] illegally altered Form 6 to create barriers for new voters. It has facilitated the widespread abuse of Form 7 for targeted deletions. The CEC [chief election commissioner] has used the ECINET to centralise control of the electoral roll, overriding all legal safeguards.”Further, he underlined that, “the nation is outraged. There is widespread anger. Protests continue despite repression. The PM [prime minister]’s ecosystem in its desperation and nervousness is now trying to divert and distract, doing what is in its very DNA—spread lies. It will not succeed. The PM-HM [prime minister-home minister] duo has been brutally exposed and the people will hold them accountable.”Also read: ‘13,150 Names Altered’: UP CEO Orders Action Against Officials After Opposition Flags Glitches in Pilibhit Voter ListECINET, the ECI officials’ portal, was launched in January 2026 as a unified platform bringing together several applications used by election officials. As The Wire reported, an audit launched by Charchagram, a civic-tech initiative examined the portal on October 2, 6, 7 and 9 and identified features that allow select officials to enable or disable state-wise access to enumeration form details. It also found that a feature dedicated to West Bengal can be used to restrict Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs (AEROs) in the state from accessing enumeration forms and the notices and hearing dashboard.Interestingly, on September 29 the ECI has removed the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) declaration added to Form 6 from its ECINET application portal in states where the SIR procedure has concluded. Despite criticisms earlier, it was only done after grave allegations were made about the poll body’s functioning in an exposé in The Indian Express.Form 6 is the application which Indians need to fill in order to demand inclusion in the electoral rolls. In July, it was changed quietly while the SIR process was ongoing in several states. The IE report indicated that election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had raised saying it could not be changed in a manner to make it mandatory for new voters to answer their parents/ grandparents “exist” in the “electoral roll of last SIR.”The Hindu reported that in Delhi almost a third of objections via Form 7 applications, which seek the deletion of names from electoral roll, are missing from the mandatory disclosures which have been made during the first 45 days of the ongoing claims and objections phase of the SIR in the national capital.In Karnataka, the police have registered at least five FIRs over bulk Form-7s under the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, after fervent protests.Also read: Tracking ECI’s U-Turns on Form 7: In West Bengal, After Allowing Unlimited Objections, ECI Caps Them at 10In West Bengal, The Wire reported that on January 16, three days before the window for claims and objections closed during the SIR in the state, the ECI told the state’s chief electoral officer (CEO) that there was no limit on how many Form 7 objections a single voter could file. However, nine months later, on October 9, the commission took a U-turn reversing its own orders, capping the number at ten per voter for the whole claims and objections period.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”. The Congress state unit had alleged that the deletion requests in Uttarakhand were auto-generated to flag minor errors and also worked selectively across the state’s districts to put its voters at a disadvantage.In Odisha’s Bhadrak, an alleged attempt to exclude Muslim names from the electoral rolls received fillip from a ground report published on The Wire, eventually prompting the ECI to suspend a key official over suspected irregularities. The report revealed that several residents in the constituency alleged that Form 7 applications had been prepared and submitted from the Bharatiya Janata Party office of Bhadrak, pointing to what they described as a striking similarity in the applications: the voters’ names and residential addresses were correctly mentioned, but the post office mentioned Bhubaneswar, which is more than 100 kilometres away from Bhadrak.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.