Since the Election Commission of India (ECI) quietly added mandatory Aadhaar authentication to its Appellate Tribunal portal on September 21, the retired High Court judges appointed by the Supreme Court have been unable to upload final orders. They asked for the requirement to be rolled back in writing on September 24 three days after it appeared and again on October 13. The Indian Express has the official correspondence: the judges called it interference with a quasi-judicial authority and refused to share their personal Aadhaar numbers. Orders continue only on paper; nothing enters the system.
These tribunals exist solely because the Supreme Court ordered them after the ECI’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) deleted roughly 27 lakh voters in West Bengal following algorithmic “logical discrepancy” flags. Of those, more than 22 lakh filed appeals against exclusion, according to the ECI’s own affidavit to the Court. Times of India and subsequent reporting confirm the scale. Earlier, the same portal could not serve notices, accept extra documents, hold virtual hearings, or even restore a deleted name. Adding Aadhaar authentication on top of those defects looks less like a technical fix and more like a lockout.
This is not an isolated glitch. Under the Modi government the ECI has faced repeated charges of institutional capture centralised software that sidelined local electoral registration officers, mass deletions disproportionately hitting Muslim-majority districts in Bengal, and internal objections from Election Commissioners themselves. The pattern is consistent: aggressive “clean-up” in opposition-ruled states, followed by procedural barriers that stall remedies the Supreme Court itself mandated. When judges of the Court’s own tribunals say they have been “practically rendered functionless,” the responsibility does not stop at Nirvachan Sadan.
Twenty-two lakh people who were struck from the rolls weeks before the last Assembly polls are still waiting for a decision on their appeals. The mechanism created to give them a chance has been frozen by the very body that deleted them. If the Modi-era Election Commission will not remove a requirement that its own tribunal judges have rejected twice, the only honest conclusion is that it prefers the deletions to stand. That is not electoral integrity but instead it’s a disenfranchisement by design.
