Petitioners in the Supreme Court on Thursday (November 27, 2025) flagged the Election Commission (EC)’s “dangerous and unreasonable” move to have schoolteachers, deployed as booth-level officers (BLOs) in the special intensive revision (SIR) exercise, determine the citizenship of voters.
Appearing before a Bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi, senior advocates Kapil Sibal and A.M. Singhvi said the court had spent the past months of SIR hearings giving the “healing touch”, while in the process relegating to the background the law that intensive revisions ought to be limited to a constituency or a small group, and not done en masse, State after State, across the country.
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Mr. Sibal submitted that the Representation of the People Act (ROPA), 1950, required a person to be 18 years of age and be ordinarily resident in a constituency to be eligible for registration in the electoral roll. He said Aadhaar could very well be used to verify both these details.
The senior lawyer said a BLO had no authority to determine citizenship. “Whether a person is an Indian citizen or not is decided by the Ministry of Home Affairs. Whether a person is of unsound mind is decided by the competent court. Laws like Prevention of Corruption Act and the Representation of the People Act would form the statutory basis for disqualifying a person from the electoral roll. You cannot ask the BLO to ascertain all this,” Mr. Sibal said.
