Kolkata: On January 16, 2026, three days before the window for claims and objections closed in West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the Election Commission of India (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.Nine months later, on October 9, 2026, the commission reversed its own orders. In an instruction to every state, it capped the number at ten per voter for the whole claims-and-objections period, citing “instances” of Form 7 objections being filed “in bulk by individual electors on unsubstantiated grounds”. By then, West Bengal’s roll had been finalised and its assembly election was long over.Form 7 is the form used to object someone’s name being on the electoral roll. Under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, it can be filed only by a voter registered in the same constituency. The objector must sign it and give a reason, such as the person has died, has moved away or is not a citizen. The electoral registration officer (ERO) then has to examine the objection and hear the person objected to before deciding whether to remove the name. Each Form 7, in other words, can set off a process that ends with a citizen losing the right to vote.The new cap of ten Form 7s applies from now on. But it does nothing for voters already removed on objections filed in January, when the commission said no cap existed. The commission has not said whether any of those objections will be looked at again.Also read: Election Commission Seeks to Remove Half the Bengal Voters Judges Have Cleared For InclusionWhat this did to people’s lives was reported by The Wire in February. In Howrah Madhya, Sheikh Liyaqat Hossein, who worked for nearly 40 years as a carpenter at Eastern Railway’s Liluah workshop, received a notice describing him as a “suspected non-Indian citizen”. It was triggered by a Form 7 filed by someone he had never met, who lived at the other end of the constituency. Nearly every adult in his extended family received a similar notice, triggered by three people from another community living at three different addresses. In Khardah, a 71-year-old tribal woman was listed as the objector against 11 voters, but the phone number given for her did not exist. In the same constituency, one family sought to delete 24 voters from another community in a different panchayat.What happened in JanuaryOn January 14, West Bengal’s CEO emailed the commission asking how many Form 7s one voter could submit during the SIR, and how many a political party’s booth-level agent (BLA) could hand in.On January 15, the commission extended the deadline for claims and objections in West Bengal, Goa, Lakshadweep, Rajasthan and Puducherry from January 15 to 19. The letter, signed by under secretary Sandeep Kumar, said the commission had “considered your requests and other relevant factors”.On January 16, the commission answered the CEO. “Currently, there are no such restrictions on number of Form 7 to be filled/submitted by an elector of that constituency to ERO/AERO as per law,” wrote under secretary Shakti Sharma. “The same applies to SIR Period also.” The only safeguard the letter mentioned was a provision of the Manual on Electoral Rolls, 2023 requiring the ERO to personally cross-check deletions where the same person was the objector in more than five cases.On party agents, the letter said a BLA could file any number of Form 7s in their own name as a voter of the constituency, on the same terms. Separately, when collecting forms signed by other voters, a BLA could submit ten a day. The letter added that these clarifications applied to both online and physical submissions.In other words, for the last four days of the extended window, from January 16 to 19, the commission’s stated position in West Bengal was that an individual voter could object to as many names as they liked.The limits that already existedThe January letter that there were “no such restrictions” was not the truth. The commission’s own October instruction shows that limits already existed.The latest instructions cite paragraph 11.3.2(ii) of the same Manual on Electoral Rolls, 2023, which says that claims and objections “presented in bulk including those sent by post, by an individual should not be entertained”. The January letter quoted a different paragraph of the Manual, on cross-checking, but did not mention this particular paragraph. The October instruction also notes that the online system already limited an individual voter to six Form 7s at a time, pending disposal, and that BLAs had been capped at 50 forms a day before the draft roll and ten a day after it.What had not been fixed, the commission now claims, was a number for physical forms handed in by an individual. That had been “left to the judgement of the EROs, which is creating challenges for the field functionaries”. In January, the CEO had asked for exactly that upper limit. The answer then was that there was none.The October reversalThe instruction of October 9, also signed by Sandeep Kumar and sent to the CEOs of all the states and Union Territories, sets two limits for both online and offline filing. An individual voter may now file no more than ten Form 7s during the entire claims-and-objections period, and no more than five a month during continuous updation of the rolls.It also reminds EROs of rules that applied throughout. Under rule 17 of the 1960 Rules, an objection not made in the prescribed form and manner “shall be rejected”. EROs must check that every Form 7 is fully filled in and signed by hand, as a seal cannot replace a signature, and verify that the objector is genuine.Also read: West Bengal SIR: As Lakhs Await Appeal Decisions, Rejections Fall Disproportionately on Muslim VotersUnder Rule 19, the ERO must issue notice to the objector, hear them, record a separate statement for each Form 7. No decision is to be made without hearing the person whose inclusion was being objected to. Where an objection turns out to be false or fabricated, the ERO is to act against the objector under Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.The instruction gives the reason for the change. Bulk objections on unsubstantiated grounds had caused “avoidable inconvenience to the elector objected upon and increased workload on field-level functionaries”.Why this matters even nowThe October instruction does not say which states prompted it. But bulk objections had already been documented during the same phase of the SIR, in West Bengal and elsewhere. In Howrah Madhya, The Wire found that a few individuals living in one corner of the constituency had filed hundreds of objections against Muslim voters in distant neighbourhoods, many of whom were flagged Under Adjudication in the final list. Similarly, in Khardah, a septuagenarian tribal woman filed objections against 11 Muslim voters living in another Panchayat. Three of them were flagged under adjudication, and one of the voters’ name were deleted in the judicial review. In West Bengal, the CEO’s daily bulletin of January 20, the day after the extended window closed, recorded 42,251 Form 7s received directly from voters after the draft roll was published, on top of 56,867 received before it. Party agents had filed 3,143 objections for exclusion, 2,926 of them by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) agents and 217 by Trinamool Congress (TMC) agents. In March, the CEO said 7,733 deletions in the final roll had come from Form 7s that people actually submitted, separate from the 5,38,320 Form 7s generated automatically by the commission’s software.The handling of those forms was itself contested. On the evening of February 15, citing allegations that records had been burnt in areas including Chakulia and Farakka, the commission ordered that all Form 7s held in CEO and district election offices be sent to EROs and AEROs by the next day for disposal. It also suspended seven AEROs in the state for “serious misconduct, dereliction of duty and misuse of statutory powers” linked to the SIR.What the daily bulletins showThe CEO’s daily bulletins, signed by additional CEO A. Niyogi, show what happened once the deadline was extended and the commission said there was no cap. Each bulletin gives running totals from December 17.Bulletin dateForm 7s from voters after the draft rollParty agents’ objections for exclusion (of which BJP)Form 6 claims after the draft rollJanuary 15 38,9050 (0)4,28,013January 16 40,688604 (591)5,11,291January 17 41,552622 (609)5,40,663January 18 41,847604 (591)5,59,053January 1941,961604 (591)5,85,951January 20 42,2513,143 (2,926)6,33,762 Until January 15, political party agents had not filed a single objection for exclusion; 604 claims for exclusion first appear in the bulletin of January 16, the day the commission told the CEO there was no limit. Of those, 591 came from BJP agents and 13 from TMC agents.Most of the party objections appear only in the last bulletin, dated January 20, a day after the window closed. Between the January 19 and January 20 bulletins, the BJP’s count rose from 591 to 2,926, and the TMC’s from 13 to 217. That means 2,539 of the 3,143 party objections, about 81%, are recorded only after the deadline had passed. They may have been received by January 19 and entered late. But under Rule 17 of the 1960 Rules, objections not lodged within the period must be rejected, so when these forms were actually received is a question for the CEO’s office.The BJP’s form 7 submissions rose to 609 in the bulletin of January 17, then fell to 591 the next day. Though these are meant to be running totals that should only go up. The bulletins of January 15 and 16 also carry the same reference number, 30/PB/CEO/2026.Form 7s filed by individual voters show no surge after the clarification. They rose by 3,346 over the extension, more than half of it (1,783) on January 16 itself, and then tapered off. The extension mainly brought claims of inclusion. Form 6 applications rose by more than two lakh over the same days, including 47,811 recorded in the bulletin after the deadline.Also read: The ECI Software Deleted 5.38 Lakh Bengal Voters With Auto-Generated Rejections Without Citing a ReasonTaken together, the bulletins put the number of Form 7s filed by people at about 1.02 lakh. That is 56,867 before the draft roll, 42,251 from voters after it and 3,143 from party agents. It is only a fraction of the 5.38 lakh Form 7 deletions the commission’s software generated. The bulletins do not show how many individual objections were filed in bulk by a single person, or whether EROs applied the Manual’s rule against entertaining bulk objections, which the January letter left out. It is not known whether any action was initiated against an objector for making a false objection.What is not yet known is how many of those objections were filed in bulk by individuals. The daily bulletins for January 16 to 20, which the CEO’s portal still has, would show whether filings rose after the clarification. It is not known whether EROs applied the Manual’s rule against entertaining bulk objections, (something which the January letter left out), or whether any objector was ever acted against for a false objection.This is only one of the many U-turns executed by the ECI after unprecedented noise and nationwide protests and even two election commissioners going on record about irregularities in the SIR. The Form 7’s no-limit to one of limits has been among the most consequential of the changes, as it fundamentally meant the EC turning a blind eye and often enabling bulk deletions of voters already on the voter lists. For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.