Supreme Court Petition Seeks Former CJI-Led Expert Panel to Review Election Commission’s Functioning
The petition mentions that 2 Election Commissioners raised their concerns in writing regarding decisions taken by CEC Gyanesh Kumar and over 38 lakh pending appeals in West Bengal SIR.
Supreme Court has been asked to constitute an independent expert committee headed by a retired CJI / Judge of Supreme Court of India to look into deficiencies by ECI.
Advocate Vishal Tiwari has approached the apex court through a public interest litigation seeking such committee to be appointed and also requested Supreme Court to direct ECI to impose "absolute prohibition" on campaign using any religion tag/ religious symbol/ communal/ sectarian/ hatred.
Petition makes clear that this is a cause free PIL which will have prospective effect. No party or office holder will be looked at in this petition nor it intends to strike down any elections.
Petition has relied upon the article published by Indian Express on Sept 23 which stated that there have been at least 14 instances where the 2 Election Commissioners - Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi recorded their objections in writing against unilateral decisions made by the CEC. This happened during a span of 10 months.
The objections recorded were about amending statutory form no. 6 without authority, bringing all the election data on one platform, appeals filed without permission in West Bengal and allotment of work.
The objections by 2 EC's came to light when ECI said in response to some query that it takes objections as notes and these are merely suggestions. Nothing was mentioned regarding who amended form 6.
The Special Intensive Revision done in West Bengal has also been brought to notice by this petition. According to a media report, ECI in its affidavit before SC stated that there are about 38.20 Lakh appeals filed by people who were excluded from electoral roll out of which barely 1.02 lakh have been decided. It has also been mentioned that ECI has asked for more Appellate Tribunal which currently stand at 19. It is seeking an increase to 42.
Another article that is referred in the petition talks about the default year of birth being shown as age 101 to 150 for 270313 voters in Maharashtra draft electoral roll.
Therefore there is a need to look into the failings by ECI through a committee of experts.
Such committee should have experts in field of constitutional law, running of elections, statistics, technology and cyber security and data protection.
