Former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa said the Election Commission was not empowered to modify Form 6 without government approval, arguing that even a unanimous decision could not authorise it to change the rules. Speaking at the India Today Conclave Mumbai 2026 amid the Special Intensive Revision row, Lavasa said adding a declaration to Form 6, used to apply for inclusion in electoral rolls, amounted to changing the prescribed form.

The Commission was not empowered and they were not competent to change the rules, he said, adding that whether two agreed or one disagreed was besides the point. Lavasa argued that the form used during the revision differed from the version prescribed in the rules and required approval from the competent authority, which he identified as the government. He also questioned the Commission's September 26 statement that the Supreme Court had upheld the changes, saying the Chief Justice had clarified that the court had not approved any change to Form 6.

Asked whether Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar should step down pending an inquiry, Lavasa declined to put himself in Kumar's position but said allegations of illegalities required accountability. If illegalities have been committed, then somebody has to own the responsibility, he said, noting that responsibility would depend on each commissioner's involvement and that the Supreme Court's verdict would determine whether an illegality had occurred.

Former Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat broadly agreed but qualified his position on Form 6, describing the dispute as involving semantics while citing a Supreme Court order that he said recognised the Commission's power to seek additional information. Rawat said eligible voters being unable to vote in West Bengal while their appeals remained pending was a more serious issue requiring immediate examination.

Lavasa questioned the use of logical discrepancies to flag voters after Electoral Registration Officers had prepared West Bengal's draft rolls. He said these officers were legally empowered to determine eligibility, while logical discrepancy was an invention of the Commission rather than a category prescribed in the rules. Nobody knows what is the algorithm of the logical discrepancy, he said.

According to Lavasa, around 60 lakh cases were flagged, prompting the appointment of 700 judicial officers, with approximately 33 lakh people restored while 27.6 lakh remained under adjudication and could not vote. Of 1.26 lakh cases decided after the election, he claimed, 93 percent involved people found to have been wrongfully deleted, calling this a scathing criticism of the procedure. Rawat said elections should have been held using the previously finalised rolls if the revision was incomplete and questioned the timing of the intensive revision.

Lavasa called the exercise conceptually flawed, questioning why the entire electorate had to establish eligibility afresh when deaths, duplicate entries and changes of residence could be addressed through annual summary revisions. He also questioned linking voting rights to whether a person's parents or grandparents appeared on an earlier roll, emphasizing that spelling and age discrepancies should not automatically lead to exclusion.

Lavasa said centralised software could improve data management but must not obstruct officials from performing their statutory duties. Rawat said ERONet was introduced in 2017 to identify duplicate entries nationwide and claimed its replacement, ECINet, was causing difficulties. Both warned that excluding eligible voters could affect election outcomes.

Lavasa also called the removal of the Chief Justice of India from the panel selecting election commissioners a government self-goal that invited allegations of bias, though he rejected the suggestion that commissioners were necessarily beholden to the government that appointed them. He described the scale of criticism facing an institution conceived as a neutral umpire as a cause of great worry.