Over six crore of the 36.73 crore voters covered in the third phase of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls have been excluded from the draft rolls across 16 states, two union territories and one National Capital Territory. In Delhi, 32.78% of the electorate was excluded, the highest proportion reported so far. Maharashtra recorded the largest absolute number, with almost 2.07 crore names excluded. These are draft figures and will change as claims and objections are processed. But their scale raises a basic question: are the safeguards built into SIR adequate to prevent eligible voters from being wrongly excluded?The scale of the exclusions does not by itself establish that the exercise is flawed. Deaths, migration, and duplicate entries inevitably account for substantial deletions in any intensive revision. The more important test is what happens when the process gets a decision wrong. How is the affected voter informed? What evidence is required to establish eligibility? How accessible is the remedy? And can the error be corrected before the voter loses the opportunity to vote?West Bengal provides important evidence on these questions. After the Supreme Court directed the setting up of appellate tribunals to hear grievances arising from the state’s SIR before the assembly election, 38,10,620 appeals were filed. According to an RTI response placed before the court, as of August 7 only 82,782, or 2.17%, had been decided. Of these, 75,443, or 91.13%, were restored to the electoral rolls, while 7,339 were excluded. The numbers expose a serious problem with the correction mechanism. Of the cases that had actually been adjudicated, more than nine in ten resulted in restoration. Yet the tribunals had disposed of only 2.17% of the appeals. More than 37 lakh remained pending. This means the system has generated a large volume of disputed cases without anything close to the capacity required to resolve them in a timely manner. The point to note is this – the existence of a right to appeal does not by itself make the process fair. A remedy is meaningful only if a voter can reasonably access it and obtain a decision in time for it to matter. In an electoral process, a correction made months after polling cannot fully remedy the loss of the vote in that election.The fact that only about seven lakh of the 27.28 lakh people classified as not eligible appealed against their own exclusion also deserves scrutiny. The data cannot establish why the others did not appeal. Some may have accepted the decision or had no reason to challenge it. But the system cannot assume that every wrongly excluded voter will know about the exclusion, understand the procedure, possess the necessary documents, and have the time and resources to pursue an appeal. The burden is particularly significant for voters who are elderly, poor, mobile, or otherwise less able to navigate administrative procedures.This brings the issue to the design of the revision process. The existing electoral-roll framework already contains safeguards. Deletions require verification, affected persons have opportunities to file claims and objections, and reasons for decisions are recorded. Form 7 requests for deletion, for example, cannot by themselves result in removal; election officials are required to verify the grounds. The policy question, therefore, is not whether safeguards exist on paper. It is whether safeguards designed for routine electoral-roll revision are adequate when millions of names are being scrutinised simultaneously. West Bengal suggests that the answer is doubtful. An individual appeals mechanism can become ineffective when the number of disputes overwhelms the institutions handling them.Also read: In Bengal, Tribunal Remedy Has Been Slowest Where the SIR Has Affected Muslim Voters the MostThe Jharkhand, experience illustrates another weakness. In Godda district, Booth Level Officers reported bulk Form 7 applications seeking deletion of voters, with many of the targeted names belonging to Muslim voters. The reports led to complaints and an inquiry. The Election Commission has maintained that Form 7 applications require verification and that names cannot be deleted merely because such forms are submitted. The issue, therefore, is not the absence of a verification rule. It is whether the system should have an additional mechanism to identify unusual patterns before they become a larger problem.A more robust system could use risk-based audits to flag unusually high concentrations of deletion requests at particular booths or in particular localities, sudden changes from historical patterns, or unusual demographic concentrations. Such alerts would not establish wrongdoing. They would simply identify cases requiring closer verification. This would supplement, rather than replace, the existing individual verification process.Bihar illustrates the importance of keeping the documentation burden under review. During litigation over the state’s SIR, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to consider Aadhaar as an additional document for the inclusion or exclusion process. The Court’s order also dealt with EPIC and ration cards as documents that could be considered. The episode demonstrated how the choice of acceptable documents can materially affect access to the revision process. The same principle should apply to the design of appellate mechanisms. Tribunal capacity should be determined before an SIR begins, based on the expected number of disputed cases. The number of tribunals, personnel and disposal timelines should be calibrated to the scale of the exercise. Deadlines should be linked to the election calendar so that cases are not left unresolved until after voting.Transparency also needs to move beyond publishing revised rolls. The Commission should routinely disclose, in a standardised format, the number of names proposed for deletion, the reasons for exclusion, claims and objections received, decisions on those claims, appeals filed, appeals disposed of, names restored and cases pending. Disaggregated data would allow independent assessment of whether exclusions or restoration rates are concentrated in particular geographic areas or voter categories. There should also be a specific legal mechanism for cases that remain unresolved close to polling. The objective should be to ensure that an unresolved administrative dispute does not become an irreversible loss of the right to vote merely because the adjudicatory process could not keep pace with the revision.The larger issue is therefore institutional capacity. SIR already has rules for verification, claims, objections, and appeals. The evidence from West Bengal suggests that these safeguards can prove inadequate when the volume of cases exceeds the system’s capacity to process them. The experience in Jharkhand shows the value of detecting unusual patterns early, while Bihar demonstrates the importance of ensuring that documentation requirements do not become an unnecessary barrier.A large-scale revision of electoral rolls will inevitably produce some errors. The legitimacy of the process depends on how those errors are handled. The test should be whether an eligible voter can discover an exclusion, challenge it without unreasonable difficulty, and obtain a decision before the election in which the vote matters. SIR needs to be judged against that standard. Legal remedies remain necessary, but they cannot substitute for a system designed to detect, prevent, and correct errors before they affect an election.P John J Kennedy is educator, columnist, and political analyst.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.