ECINET audit flags Bengal-only exclusion from enumeration forms, hearing dashboard

A third-party audit of the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) ECINET portal has found a Bengal-specific restriction in its publicly available code that can prevent Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs (AEROs) from accessing voters’ enumeration forms and the notice-and-hearing dashboard.

The audit, conducted by civic-tech initiative Charchagram, found the exclusion in code fetched as recently as October 19. Researchers found no similar restriction for EROs and AEROs in the code for any other state, Hindustan Times reported.

FACT could not independently verify the findings. The audit did not establish whether the feature had been used or when the restriction was introduced. The ECI did not respond to a questionnaire sent by the newspaper.

Code contains separate restriction for Bengal

Charchagram data scientist Saurav Rajput examined the portal on October 2, 6, 7 and 9. The audit found that the “View Enumeration Form Details” tile, available on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) Phase II landing page, contained a separate exclusion for West Bengal.

“The ‘View Enumeration Form Details’ is a general tile available to SIR Phase II landing page,” Rajput told HT. “West Bengal is separately hard-coded in the codebase and excluded from it (for ERO and AERO).”

The restriction also covered the notice-and-hearing dashboard, which officers use to track and process notices and hearing-related actions linked to voter registration and electoral roll revision.

The enumeration form page contains details such as an elector’s name and voter ID number, constituency, part and serial number, submitted documents and the booth-level officer’s recommendation. It also includes options to return a form to the booth-level officer or flag an elector as a previous-SIR voter.

Audit could not establish server-side restrictions

Per HT, Rajput said the researchers examined only the front-end JavaScript code made publicly available by the website. They did not log in, use credentials or call any endpoints.

The findings, therefore, establish the presence of a restriction in the publicly served code, but do not confirm whether the server independently enforced it.

“Server-side enforcement isn’t visible to us,” Rajput told HT. Asked whether the restriction appeared in earlier versions, he said, “We don’t know. We did not have access to earlier versions, so we cannot say whether the rule existed before or has changed.”

Rajput said he had first noticed the feature on September 28. The current build was introduced on October 16.

Restriction surfaces amid contentious SIR process

The finding comes against the backdrop of Bengal’s contentious SIR exercise, which led to 2.71 million people being disenfranchised. The draft electoral roll, published on December 16, removed 7.8 per cent of the pre-SIR electorate. The ECI subsequently flagged 13.6 million people for logical discrepancies, prompting a prolonged verification process.

On February 20, the Supreme Court entrusted hearings in the discrepancy cases to judicial officers. They completed their work on April 6, with 2.2 million names removed from the rolls among the 13.6 million cases examined. Appeals remained pending before 19 appellate tribunals, while several judges later raised concerns about the ECI’s portal and backend processes.

Mamata All India Trinamool Congress (MAITC) MP Abhishek Banerjee had alleged on February 21 that EROs in Bengal were “no longer able to monitor” AEROs’ progress on ECINET during the SIR exercise.

Supreme Court advocate Harshit Anand said the restriction, if applied, would conflict with the court’s directions.

“At least in the context of Bengal, this option goes clearly against the mandate of the SC direction,” he said. “The two orders read together place primary responsibility of verification of documents on the EROs/AEROs; satisfaction of judicial officers is a subsequent step.

To deny them access to forms and claims would impede even the judicial officers from forming an opinion as they do not verify the documents themselves and only rely on the EROs/AEROs reports.”