The Trinamool Congress on Saturday accused the chief electoral officer of dismissing certain issues the party flagged regarding the role of Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) during the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

“What is even more alarming is that when this serious anomaly was escalated to the chief electoral officer, West Bengal, through the district election officers, it was met with a cavalier and dismissive response wholly unbecoming of a constitutional office,” said Abhishek Banerjee, the Trinamool general secretary and Diamond Harbour MP. “This is precisely the entrenched babu culture that has come to characterise the EC functioning, and stood implicitly rebuked by the Supreme Court only yesterday.”

Abhishek claimed the EROs could no longer monitor the progress of the Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) on the ECINet portal.

“This amounts to a triple violation,” said Abhishek, who also shared some purported screenshots of WhatsApp group chats to illustrate his claim.

The fresh salvo from the Trinamool came on the day when Justice Sujoy Paul, the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, met with state and central poll panel officials to sort out the SIR process. This was done on the Supreme Court's instruction, which wants the remainder of the SIR process to continue under the watch of judicial officers and former judges.

The Trinamool general secretary said denying access to the EROs violated Section 13 B of the Representation of the People Act.

The Section 13B states that electoral rolls shall be prepared and revised by an electoral registration officer. “It also violated Section 13C of the Act, which states that AEROs are to “assist any electoral registration officer in the performance of his functions” and that they are subject to the control of the electoral registration officer,” Abhishek said.

He also said the Supreme Court had stated that the EROs will have the final say in the inclusion/exclusion of the voters in the final rolls.

“This violates the explicit intent of the Supreme Court’s order on February 9. It also violated the SC’s order on February 20, where the apex court made it clear under Logical discrepancy/Unmapped category, persons to whom notices were issued have submitted documents in support of their claims for inclusion in the voter list. These claims are required to be adjudicated, in a way, through a quasi-judicial process by the EROs,” said Abhishek.

Abhishek said the commission had stated on June 24, 2025 that the “ERO of each Assembly constituency shall be responsible for ensuring that no eligible citizen is left out and not ineligible person is included.”

“This triple violation strikes at the very heart of constitutional governance by dismantling institutional checks and balances, creating fertile ground for arbitrary and unlawful deletion of voters at the discretion of AEROs,” Abhishek said. “Nobody has the right to play God with the democratic rights of Bengal’s voters.”