Explore Business Standard
Voting
As part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal, more than 70 lakh enumeration forms were distributed by over 80,000 booth-level officers (BLOs) on the first day of their house-to-house visits across the state, an official said on Wednesday. The month-long exercise began in the state on Tuesday and will continue till December 4. "On Tuesday, over 70 lakh enumeration forms were distributed by the BLOs," an official of the Election Commission told PTI. BLOs continued visiting the residences of voters across West Bengal on Wednesday to distribute the enumeration forms, he said. "Adequate security personnel are accompanying the BLOs for their safety. Yesterday, there were no untoward incidents reported from anywhere in the state. If any resistance is reported against a BLO, we immediately instruct the district electoral officers (DEOs) to investigate," the official said. As part of the process, 80,681 BLOs have been deployed across the 294 assembly ..
Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the Election Commission's voters' list cleanup exercise, will commence in nine states and three Union territories from Tuesday. SIR in these states and Union territories with 51 crore voters will conclude on February 7, 2026, with the publication of the final electoral roll. After Bihar, this is the second round of SIR. The state's final voter list with nearly 7.42 crore names was published on September 30. The 12 states and Union territories where the second round of SIR will be conducted are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Among these, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala and West Bengal will go to polls in 2026. In Assam, another state where polls are due in 2026, the revision of electoral rolls will be announced separately as a Supreme Court-supervised exercise to verify citizenship is underway in the state. Also, a ...
The Supreme Court on Friday sought responses of the Centre and the Election Commission on a PIL seeking recognition of voting rights for nearly 4.5 lakh undertrial prisoners lodged in jails across India. A bench comprising Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran took note of the submissions of lawyer Prashant Bhushan that the present blanket ban imposed under Section 62(5) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, violates constitutional guarantees and international democratic norms. The petition filed by Sunita Sharma, a resident of Patiala in Punjab, made the Centre through the Ministry of Law and Justice and the Election Commission as respondents. It seeks judicial intervention to ensure that prisoners, who have not been convicted of electoral offences or corruption, are not arbitrarily deprived of their democratic right to vote.
President Donald Trump on Monday vowed more changes to the way elections are conducted in the U.S., but based on the Constitution there is little to nothing he can do on his own. Relying on false information and conspiracy theories that he's regularly used to explain away his 2020 election loss, Trump pledged on his social media site that he would do away with both mail voting which remains popular and is used by about one-third of all voters and voting machines some form of which are used in almost all of the country's thousands of election jurisdictions. These are the same systems that enabled Trump to win the 2024 election and Republicans to gain control of Congress. Trump's post marks an escalation even in his normally overheated election rhetoric. He issued a wide-ranging executive order earlier this year that, among other changes, would have required documented proof-of-citizenship before registering to vote. His Monday post promised another election executive order to help