IndiaPosted at: Sep 24 2026 12:11PM


Goa Roll Row: 97 voters not restored despite ERO nod, Congress alleges ECINet override

New Delhi, Sep 24 (UNI) Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Thursday stepped up his party's attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI), citing a report on 97 voters in Goa who remained excluded from the final electoral roll despite being found eligible by ground-level officers.
Ramesh linked the episode to an Indian Express report on internal objections by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi over centralisation of electoral-roll management.
According to the fresh investigation cited by Ramesh, Goa's Chief Electoral Officer wrote to the ECI eight times between February 11 and 17 seeking a rollback facility for 97 voters.
The 97 voters has been flagged during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) for "logical discrepancies". Following Supreme Court directions, they were given a chance to produce documents and be heard. Goa's EROs and AEROs examined the cases and held them eligible for inclusion.
The hitch, the report said, was ECINet - the ECI's centralised platform. The system did not allow EROs to reverse the earlier deletions. Communications were addressed to Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti, with Director General (IT) Seema Khanna copied.
On February 18, Deputy Election Commissioner Sanjay Kumar wrote to Khanna stating the IT system could not block action required to comply with the Supreme Court and sought enabling of the facility.
Despite this, the final roll was published on February 21 with the 97 names still missing. Goa CEO Sanjay Goel told the newspaper that the state had informed ECI about voters found eligible, but "The call (to not include) was theirs," adding there should have been a mechanism in ECINet for re-inclusion at ERO level.
Ramesh said: "The Goa CEO wrote to the ECI 8 times in 7 days for inclusion of valid voters deleted by the ECINet software... the emails were ignored and voters deleted." He alleged the entire SIR had been handed over to ECINet, claiming phase 3 had flagged 54 per cent of voters in Delhi and nearly 12 crore across states.
He also alleged that EROs' access to ECINet was restricted despite their statutory role under the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and that the two Election Commissioners had flagged this to the Cabinet Secretary. He claimed Form 6 process for new voters had been made harder, saying "Gen Z is being targeted for exclusion."
Congress leader Pawan Khera, in a post titled "The State of Exception in India", said: "Goa's ground-level Electoral Registration Officers decided that 97 voters should be restored to the rolls. But the software controlled by the Election Commission of India's IT division in Delhi did not give them access to reverse the earlier deletions."
Ramesh linked the issue to Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi's criticism of the election process after Haryana and Maharashtra results, saying, "The election process has been thoroughly compromised and vitiated," and demanded the resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar.
The ECI has maintained that decisions on SIR were taken unanimously by all three members and that roll revision involves statutory scrutiny at multiple levels, rejecting suggestions of a split in the Commission.
At the heart of the dispute is whether an ERO can exercise statutory authority if the centralised software does not permit implementation of that decision - an issue that has now turned 97 voters in Goa into a test case for the wider debate on centralised technological control versus decentralised statutory safeguards.
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Tags: #Goa Roll Row: 97 voters not restored despite ERO nod# Congress alleges ECINet override
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