Goa case of 97 voters: One day after Express report, deleted voters asked to submit Form 6

A day after the Indian Express investigation reported that 97 Goa voters found eligible by Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) were left out of the final roll because of a missing rollback facility in the ECINET system, a Booth Level Officer (BLO) in Taleigao constituency reached out to three of the 97 – brothers Ayub, Sohaib and Yusuf – and gave them Form 6 on September 24 to enrol again as voters.

The following day, all three filled out and submitted the forms with the required documents; the BLO confirmed this to Newslaundry. They will now have to be added to the electoral roll through the fresh-registration process.

The Express report was published on September 23. That day, the Election Commission of India (ECI) issued a statement. While it was silent on Goa, local poll officials soon began moving to add these voters as new ones via Form 6. 

Newslaundry accessed a list of 61 Taleigao electors who were among the 97. Bento S Vas, the BLO for Part 3 of Taleigao, told Newslaundry that on September 24, the ERO instructed BLOs to visit these electors, give them Form 6 and register them as voters. The list was shared with BLOs on WhatsApp for this purpose.

On September 26, the Election Commission issued another statement, saying 81 of the 97 electors had submitted Form 6 applications for inclusion in the electoral roll. But it did not say when they had applied, or whether officials had initiated their re-enrolment before or after The Indian Express report.

As of October 1, 88 of these 97 voters had been added, according to the Goa Chief Electoral Officer on X. The post also said three had Portuguese passports and six were outside India. The Commission said it was making efforts to contact those currently outside the country.

Speaking to Newslaundry, Goa CEO Sanjay Goyle said that these voters had submitted Form 6 and that, based on their applications, their names were being added back to the electoral roll. 

Some of those asked to re-enrol object to being treated as new voters. “The EC has asked us to fill Form 6, but why should we apply as new voters?” said Paresh Salgaoncar, who petitioned the High Court of Bombay at Goa after his name and those of his family members were deleted. He said that those registered as new voters would be included only in the supplementary list, not the final electoral roll. 

A court asks what the glitch is

Hearing his petition on September 30, a division bench of Justices Amit S Jamsandekar and Valmiki Menezes of the High Court of Bombay at Goa sharply pulled up the Election Commission, observing that administrative software systems cannot supersede statutory electoral laws. Questioning how existing voters had arbitrarily become “new voters” just to accommodate an inflexible portal, the bench remarked: “What empowers you to delete without a hearing? Your officers were helpless and just decided to throw it on the system.” 

Demanding to know “what is the glitch” preventing officers from overriding the digital portal to correct legitimate entries, the court expressed concern over how many others might have suffered in silence, warning that if software rejections dictate roll revisions, “lakhs will go off the rolls.” 

The warning comes against a roll that has already shrunk. Goa’s special intensive revision (SIR) of its voter rolls began in November 2025 with 11,85,034 electors and ended with a final roll of 10,57,566, a net decrease of 1,27,468, or 10.76 percent. 

Why the system cannot undo a deletion

The Express reported that Goa's EROs had examined 97 cases in which voters challenged their exclusion after being flagged for “logical discrepancies”. After hearing the voters and examining their documents, the EROs found that all 97 were eligible to be included in the final roll.

But the EROs could not reverse the earlier deletions because ECINET’s electoral roll module did not have a rollback or reversion facility. The module, introduced as ERONET to replace 36 separate systems, is where election officials process applications to add, correct or delete voters. 

The problem had been flagged repeatedly. On February 11, the office of the state’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) wrote to the ECI saying that the required rollback/reversion functionality, including document re-upload, had still not been provided despite multiple requests from election officials.

Between February 11 and 17, the Goa CEO’s office wrote eight times to Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti, with ECI's Director General (IT) Seema Khanna copied each time, seeking the rollback facility. The requests came just days before the February 21 deadline for publication of the final roll. The facility was not enabled in time.

The 97 voters were spread across Taleigao, St Cruz, Cumbarjua, Priol, Margao, Benaulim and Velim constituencies. 

A renovation, a hearing and a fresh form

The larger problem reported by The Indian Express played out for Ayub Tashewale, a 35-year-old mechanic from Panaji, whose routine house renovation turned into an ongoing bureaucratic hurdle after he and his two brothers found that their names had been deleted from the electoral roll. 

The three brothers had temporarily moved out of their ancestral home at House No. 86, Dhanlaxmi Nagar, near Bhatlem Masjid, in the Taleigao constituency. The house had structural problems and damaged walls that required extensive repairs. While waiting for municipal permissions, the brothers shifted to rented accommodation nearby. Ayub moved to an apartment in a building directly behind the house, while his elder brother Yusuf, 37, and younger brother Sohaib, 34, moved within a two-kilometre radius.

Despite remaining in the same vicinity, their house was marked vacant and the names of Ayub, Yusuf and Sohaib were deleted from the draft roll on the ground that they had shifted.

After learning about the deletion during the SIR, Ayub contacted the BLO and later received a notice from the ERO's office. He and his brothers submitted their documents and appeared for a hearing at the Registrar's office in Panaji.

Officials asked them for identification documents, including passports and older records connected to their father. Since their father did not have a passport, Ayub travelled to his village to obtain his father's old caste certificate and other identity documents.

“We made a caste certificate of our father on February 4. Then they submitted all the documents,” Sohaib, Ayub’s brother, told Newslaundry.

The officials accepted the documents and told the brothers that the hearing was complete and their names would be restored.

But weeks later, when the family checked with the BLO, the names were still deleted. Instead of restoring their existing entries, the family was told that their voter IDs had been cancelled and that they would have to apply afresh.

“We told them several times that we are old voters but the election officials said our old voter registration had been deleted. So now I have to fill out a new form. There is no other option,” Ayub said.

“They told us, ‘The name will be added, it's done, you may leave.’ Later on, when the due date had passed... I checked, and it was still showing as deleted,” Sohaib said.

He said the family repeatedly followed up with the BLO. “We told the BLO that our names were deleted like this... so he kept putting it off for so many days saying, ‘It has to be redone, it should be done’ and then suddenly came and handed over the forms.”

Another BLO Ravi Shankar brought the forms on September 24, and the brothers submitted Form 6 the next day along with documents relating to their ancestral property. 

Their case now has to go through a fresh enrolment process even though, according to Sohaib, they had already appeared before election officials, submitted documents and were told that their names would be restored. The fresh applications offer the family a route back into the electoral roll, but through a process meant for new inclusion rather than simply recording the ERO's earlier decision to restore an existing voter. 

Ayub said, “This is cheating with us.”

“I don’t have any problem right now, but my children will face problems. It’s the system's mistake, but we are the ones being harassed,” he added. 

Others face the same hurdle

Ayub's case is not the only example in Goa where a voter who challenged deletion found that the problem was not simply proving eligibility, but getting the election system to record the decision.

Alexandre Jose Rodrigues, another Taleigao voter, said his name was deleted from the final electoral roll published after the SIR. He said a BLO visited him on September 24 and gave him Form 6. “During the SIR, I submitted my form along with all the documents, but our name was deleted. We don’t know why that happened. This time, the BLO told us to fill out this form and said we would get a new voter card,” Rodrigues said.

In 28-Nuvem Assembly constituency, Natalina Fernandes and her two children also challenged their omission from the electoral roll during the SIR. They obtained an order in their favour for retention of their names, but election officials were unable to restore their original EPIC (Electoral Photo Identity Card) numbers.

Officials told the family that once an elector's entry is deleted from the system during the SIR process, the existing workflow does not provide an option to restore the deleted EPIC. Instead, a fresh Form 6 application has to be processed, effectively treating the person as a new applicant.

This creates a peculiar situation: a voter can challenge a deletion, provide documents and obtain an order in their favour, but the administrative software may still leave officials without a mechanism to restore the original entry.

Elvis Gomes, a former bureaucrat and politician who has handled the Natalina case, said, “The right to vote is a constitutional right. A substantive right should not be taken away merely through procedure.”  

Gomes said his case against the District Election Officer (DEO) was concluded on September 30. “We had a final hearing on Wednesday (September 30); we are waiting for the DEO order,” he said.

Questions over the remedy

SIR Citizens’ Monitor, a local civil society organisation, has questioned the legality of the entire revision drive. The group warned that excluded electors risk having their citizenship questioned, noting that the judicial nod for the SIR was anchored on the ECI's claim of citizenship verification. Citing internal communications up to May 2026, the watchdog said Goa poll authorities repeatedly warned New Delhi about the absence of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for appeals and the lack of a rollback option in ERONET 2.0 (upgraded version of ERONET) to restore deleted names, but received no response. Holding the ECI directly responsible, the group termed the exercise an “arbitrary and haphazard” process carried out in violation of statutory rules.

Albertina Almeida, a lawyer and member of the SIR Citizens’ Monitor, said, “There is a serious risk for all those who have been wrongly excluded from the voter list, because if this SIR roll becomes the baseline for future revisions, they will struggle to prove their credentials.” Questioning the poll panel’s remedy, she added, “Why is the EC asking voters to fill Form 6 when the commission wrongly deleted their names in the first place?”  

Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi questioned the use of Form 6 in such cases in an October 2 post on X, saying it is “only for NEW voters” and cannot be filled by a deleted voter.

However, an Election Commission official said that while Quraishi’s point that Form 6 is meant for new voters is technically correct, electoral law provides no other form for including a person whose name has been deleted from the electoral roll. 

“If your name has been deleted from the electoral roll, there is no provision for inclusion except through Form 6,” the official said, adding that the electoral manual also provides for this procedure, and that Form 6 is therefore being used to restore the names of such electors.

The EC’s review

Following the concerns raised by the Express report, the Election Commission has announced a comprehensive review of ECINET. A committee headed by a Senior Deputy Election Commissioner, alongside an independent expert from an IIT, has been tasked with “double-checking” the software's compliance with statutory electoral Acts and Rules. According to the ECI, the panel’s findings will guide the restoration of “any further flexibility required by field officers” like EROs on the ground. 

Moving forward, the poll panel has also mandated that all future IT modules and portal upgrades must undergo scrutiny by a Committee of Officers before reaching the Commission for final approval – a tacit acknowledgement of the friction between centralised software controls and statutory ground-level discretion. 

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