Congress Alleges ECINet Built to Centralise Roll Changes From BJP HQ; Poll Body Denies Charge

The Congress on Thursday, October 8, 2026, alleged that the Election Commission of India's ECINet application was "designed to centralise all deletions and additions" from the headquarters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in New Delhi, and said concerns raised by a security researcher about the platform in July were acknowledged only months later.

Congress general secretary in charge of communications Jairam Ramesh made the allegation in a post on X, in which he shared a screenshot of a media report quoting a security researcher as saying that he had flagged flaws in the Commission's voter-services website and its ECINet application to the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the national cyber-security agency, CERT-In.

Mr. Ramesh said the report stated that on July 8, 2026, the researcher had brought several flaws in ECINet to the Commission's attention, but that acknowledgement of one of his concerns came only on October 6, 2026, "when the ECI was under all-round fire and attack."

"It is becoming abundantly clear that ECINet was designed to centralise all deletions/additions from BJP HQs in New Delhi," the Congress leader alleged.

He also noted that the researcher was the same individual who had earlier exposed vulnerabilities in the information-technology systems of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), and drew a parallel between that episode and the present controversy.

Mr. Ramesh's claim is a political allegation. No documentary evidence supporting it has been placed on record by the Congress, and the Commission has not publicly responded to the specific charge that the platform was built to route changes to the electoral roll through the BJP's headquarters. The reported exchange between the researcher and the two agencies has also not been independently confirmed.

ECINet is the Commission's digital platform for voter-related services, part of a wider effort to move electoral-roll services online. The application has drawn scrutiny in the course of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, a process that has been contested by opposition parties and upheld by the Commission as lawful.

Mr. Ramesh's remarks came amid an ongoing row over a report in The Indian Express that election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected on record at least 14 times over the past 10 months to decisions and orders, mostly related to the SIR process.

Under criticism over the objections raised by two of its commissioners, the ECI said that differing views and observations are a part of deliberations in any institution, and that all its orders carry full legal sanction and follow established statutory procedures.

Both strands of the controversy — the alleged technical flaws flagged to the ECI and CERT-In, and the reported dissent within the Commission — concern an institution whose decisions on the electoral roll are open to legal challenge and public scrutiny. Neither the BJP nor the two agencies named in the media report cited by Mr. Ramesh had issued a public response at the time of writing.