Faith

New Delhi, India – Indian democracy has been shaken by new revelations showing divisions within the body that is in charge of conducting its elections over controversial policies that critics say have disenfranchised tens of millions of people.

India’s Election Commission, a supposedly autonomous constitutional body, is tasked with administering elections in the world’s largest democracy, and in recent decades, had won admirers across the globe for its success in conducting a voting process unmatched in scale and complexity.

But an investigation by The Indian Express newspaper reported that the current chief of the commission frequently overruled concerns raised by his two other equally ranked commissioners about the integrity of ongoing changes in the voter database.

These revelations come after a months-long struggle by India’s opposition parties to bring what they have described as the “sabotaging” conduct of the election commission to the fore, which they say is dictated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party for its electoral benefit.

For decades, India has grappled with deep inequality; divisions along caste, religious and ethnic lines; and the growing role of money in its elections. Yet through it all, the actual conduct of its elections was largely viewed as “free” domestically and by global monitors.

But leading opposition leaders have, in recent months and years, for the first time, questioned whether elections can be trusted and whether votes are counted accurately, as well as whether rights decide who gets to be a voter or if those in authority take the decision arbitrarily. Those concerns, say analysts, are likely to only be amplified by the latest revelations.

“Today, that faith [in the election process] has shaken. It is very shocking for the nation,” SY Quraishi, who headed India’s election commission between 2010 and 2012, told Al Jazeera. “The Election Commission used to be a very reputed institution. Now, it is totally dysfunctional – and that’s an understatement.”

So, what does this mean for India and its democracy?

What are the latest revelations about India’s Election Commission?

Earlier this week, the Indian Express newspaper published a series of stories, based on internal documents and interviews, laying bare divisions within the poll panel – consisting of three commissioners, Gyanesh Kumar, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, and Vivek Joshi. Kumar is the commission’s chief.

Indian law requires the commission to decide by a majority. Reports revealed that Sandhu and Joshi resisted and questioned the legality of measures Kumar took unilaterally.

Since June last year, the commission has been revising and updating the voters list state-wise. It has struck off more than 13 million names during the exercise since then, which the critics say targeted economically weaker sections, minorities, and other vulnerable groups of Indian society disproportionately.

Opposition parties took the matter to the country’s top court, which largely signed off on the process to decide on who gets to vote in India. For India’s more than 1.4 billion population, a voting right does not end merely on ballots – rather, several government welfare schemes are tied to voting rights.

Now, reports reveal that some of the strongest resistance to the three-member commission’s decisions was coming from within. In fact, Sandhu and Joshi formally objected on record at least 14 times over the last 10 months to measures issued by circumventing them. Sandhu called it “unauthorised and illegal”.

Those objections related to the new voter registration mandate; deletion and restoration of voters in the rolls; appeals by people against deletions; and the security of the list. In short, everything the commission undertook.

The opposition has alleged that the additions and deletions of the voters are undertaken as an exercise to disenfranchise a section of voters to benefit Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The commission maintained that access to the voters’ list is highly secured and decentralised, meaning that even in the remotest parts of the country, a local officer made the judgement and decision.

But the latest revelations show that the commission relied on ECINet, a digital platform that logs nearly a billion voters, which was increasingly centralised, giving more control to New Delhi over editing calls.

In one instance, the newspaper reported that officials in the coastal state of Goa flagged nearly a hundred voters who were mistakenly taken out. Editing access was limited to New Delhi.

So, Goa’s chief electoral officer wrote eight emails to officials in New Delhi in a week before the deadline passed, but got no response and voters were knocked off the list.

Why is revision of voters’ list controversial?

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), as the process of revising the list is called, has become controversial mainly because it places an unusually heavy burden on existing voters to prove their eligibility.

Such a drive requires people to produce old records, like birth, land, and education certificates – and puts poorer, migrant, and marginalised Indians at a disadvantage, essentially drawing lines on who gets to vote in India. A minor mismatch, such as a spelling, in decades-old records could result in being struck from the voters list in India.

Opposition parties and civil society groups have argued that mass deletions could significantly alter the electorate before elections.

In some places, the exercise has been reported to disenfranchise minorities, including Muslims. In the eastern state of West Bengal, Al Jazeera earlier reported that the exercise removed 9 million residents from the electoral rolls just days before the state elections that were held in April and May.

Nearly 34 percent of the deleted voters were Muslims in the state, where they only make up 27 percent of the population. Then, Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu majoritarian BJP came to power for the first time in the politically critical state.

The BJP and supporters of the SIR process have argued that it is fundamentally aimed at removing illegal migrants, the deceased or fraudulent voters from the rolls – and have tried to portray many Muslims eliminated from the lists in border states as “illegal Bangladeshi migrants,” despite hard evidence that Indian nationals have been victims of the process.

But as the exercise has been expanded to other parts of the country, those claims have increasingly returned to embarrass even proponents of the exercise: In New Delhi, notices were served to India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and his wife, alongside other high-profile politicians, judges and senior bureaucrats. Several former Indian ambassadors to countries across the world have received notices to prove that they are Indian – even though they have served as India’s sovereign representatives abroad for years.

All of this has turned what was political opposition to the SIR process into much more broad-based, nationwide scepticism about the lack of transparency in the Election Commission’s software, the process of matching voters against decades-old electoral rolls, and the criteria being used to flag voters as having “logical discrepancies”.

“The [revision of voters’ list] fundamentally inverts India’s model of electoral democracy,” said Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia programme at the Washington, DC-based nonpartisan think tank The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Since the adoption of the Constitution, India has assumed the burden of ensuring that the last man or woman is registered to vote,” he said. Vaishnav added that unlike other democracies, notably the United States, which has repeatedly thrown up barriers to the franchise, “India historically adopted an unusually activist approach to voter registration.”

“Specifically, the way in which [the revision] has been carried out threatens to turn that principle on its head,” he told Al Jazeera. “It is now the voter who must prove his or her entitlement to remain on the electoral rolls.”

Quraishi, the former election commissioner of India, told Al Jazeera that he has been against the policies taken up under the revision.

“I hope [these revelations] are a wake-up call and serious action will be undertaken, including at the Supreme Court, the central government, and the Parliament,” Quraishi told Al Jazeera.

“Because the reputation of the Election Commission has gone into the dumps. And it is very difficult to restore it now,” he said. “We need efforts to rebuild faith in the system.”

What is the opposition demanding?

Leader of the opposition Rahul Gandhi has accused the Election Commission of “treason” against the nation, and promised that its leaders will be tried for it, if his Congress Party returns to power.

India’s popular Gen-Z pressure group, the Cockroach Janta Party, whose protest movement led to the ouster of India’s education minister in July, has threatened to hit the streets again if Kumar, the commission’s sitting chief, does not resign by Saturday.

The Cockroach group has also called for an overhaul in the selection process of the next election commissioner.

For its part, the election commission has said in a statement that the investigation report drew on “differing views and deliberations” between the three commissioners rather than official statements of protest. Sambit Patra, a spokesman for Modi’s party, told reporters that any deliberation or divisions in the commission were rather “a sign of a healthy democracy”.

But none of that appears to be cutting ice in a nation where far too many people have now faced the threat of losing their vote through an opaque process.

“Our elections are fundamentally broken,” said Gandhi at a news conference in New Delhi on Thursday. “The sacred belief in elections,” he added, was evaporating.

Aiming at Modi, Gandhi argued that the popularity of a leader could be understood, but not “how anti-incumbency disappears”.

“It doesn’t exist in North Korea. There is no democracy where anti-incumbency doesn’t work. We are looking for answers to where it went here,” Gandhi said, in effect questioning Modi’s re-election first in 2019 and then again in 2024, with a much-reduced mandate – even though there is no firm evidence of widespread voter manipulation helping Modi win those elections. “And we have found answers.”

What does it mean for Indian polity?

Asim Ali, a political analyst in New Delhi, said that the Indian republic is standing at a “dangerous moment, where we could see a breakdown of the republic.”

“We have reached a situation where every opposition party feels that the democratic guardrails have been destroyed,” Ali told Al Jazeera, adding that the allegations are about the worry that “independent institutions like the Election Commission and Supreme Court have become co-opted.”

The political cleavage has created an extreme polarisation of politics in India. “Politics has assumed a kind of existential stakes, where we have unrestrained politics of friend vs enemy,” he added.

Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst and senior journalist who has covered the Indian government for several decades, told Al Jazeera that “impartiality is paramount” for the Election Commission.

“The fact is that Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion,” he said. “In India, we have seen difficult times, including a state emergency, but never was the role of the Election Commission compromised at this level.”

Kidwai noted that Modi’s party has ridiculed opposition parties’ concerns about free-and-fair elections, calling them sore losers. “The outcomes of a match are inconsequential, but at least the umpire should play fair,” he told Al Jazeera.

The major criticisms of Indian democracy in recent years have principally related to what happens in between elections, said Vaishnav of the Carnegie Endowment think tank.

While critics “pointed to the erosion of basic freedoms, an uneven rule of law, and the concentration of power in the hands of the executive,” Vaishnav said, “most observers have argued that when the electoral spotlight is on, India’s democracy remains remarkably robust and competitive.”

The conduct of the Election Commission is “now calling this distinction into question”, he added.

NEW YORK — Some of the loudest cheers for Sen. Ted Cruz at the Republicans’ recent midterm convention in Dallas came after the Texas politician targeted Muslim Americans and their faith’s religious code.

“Sharia law has no place in America,” said Cruz. “We need to stand together and stop it now.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott chimed in moments later, vowing to “fully ban Sharia law in Texas.”

Muslim American civic leaders and scholars — in Texas and other states — are responding forcefully to this latest surge in anti-Sharia rhetoric that dates back more than 15 years.

They passionately defend Sharia — the way it’s practiced in the United States — as positive guidance that has elements in common with the codes of other faiths, such as the Ten Commandments and the collective body of Jewish law derived from the Torah. They rebut the claims of GOP critics that Sharia is a coercive code that threatens the U.S. Constitution and judicial system.

Though there are multiple interpretations of Sharia, its essence is to serve as a code for how Muslims should live and worship — covering such matters as prayer, pilgrimages, fasting, charitable donations and personal virtue.

Among the most energetic of Sharia’s defenders is Illinois-based Sabeel Ahmed, director of an outreach project called GainPeace. He travels widely around the U.S., with a recent focus on Texas, speaking at mosque-sponsored workshops and open houses.

“Sharia is often misunderstood,” Ahmed posted on Instagram after a midsummer visit to Plano, Texas. “Many people think Sharia is only about punishments, but in Islam it is Allah’s guidance for living with faith, justice, mercy, and responsibility.”

Ahmed attributes the durability of anti-Sharia vitriol to politicians and social-media influencers who want to rile up their voting base or their followers.

“They gain popularity by saying it,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s the job of the Muslims to educate what is the proper meaning of the word Sharia. We cannot be angry or hateful.”

Sharia’s role varies significantly among Muslim nations

Among those appalled by the anti-Sharia surge in the U.S. is Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a Sudanese-born Islamic scholar who taught for many years at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. He is a longtime critic of the relatively small number of governments in Muslim nations that coercively enforce Sharia, saying Muslims are better off in secular states where their religious observance is a matter of free choice.

An-Na’im says he and other Muslim Americans embrace Sharia willingly as a core part of their identity, even as they also embrace American values.

The demonization of their beliefs displays “a shocking ignorance of what Sharia means,” An-Na’im said. “It’s a total dehumanization of the other, the rejection of their right to be human.”

The rhetoric is similarly dramatic among Sharia’s opponents — epitomized by the two U.S. representatives from Texas, Republicans Keith Self and Chip Roy — who co-founded the Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress.

“Sharia is a direct threat to our Constitution and Western values and seeks to replace our legal system and erode our basic freedoms,” Roy said earlier this year. “Our immigration system must be prepared to confront this challenge and defend our Judeo-Christian values.”

By last count, the caucus had more than 60 members. All of them are Republicans, and its members have introduced several anti-Sharia bills since the caucus was formed last December. None of those measures have been successful.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, has designated the caucus as an anti-Muslim hate group.

“The bigoted rhetoric used by this caucus resembles the hatred that anti-Catholic politicians once unleashed against Irish Americans,” said CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor.

“Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years,” he added. “No one who wrote the Constitution or enforced it since has empowered these legislators to pick which religions get to exist in America.”

Texas has been a battleground for Sharia disputes

There has been substantive anti-Sharia action in Texas. In August, Attorney General Ken Paxton demanded documents from the Dallas-based Islamic Tribunal, which provides religious guidance to Muslims.

Paxton said in a news release that the investigation by his office sought to determine if the tribunal was engaged in illegal activity, such as acting as a court, applying foreign laws that conflict with Texas or federal law, or issuing rulings that imply government authority.

“This is America, and we will not be governed by sharia law,” Paxton said.

The Islamic Tribunal subsequently updated its website with a “ Clarification of Mission and Activities,” stressing that its guidance “complements, and never replaces, the legal, social, and professional services available in American society.”

“The Tribunal does not function as a court of law and does not issue legally binding judgments,” it said. “Our role is limited to mediation and religious arbitration requested by members of the Muslim community in matters related to faith, family guidance, and internal religious affairs.”

Any matters requiring legal enforcement are referred directly to the Texas judicial system, said the tribunal, which likened its work to the services provided by Jewish Beth Din courts and Catholic ecclesiastical tribunals.

Sharia defenders seek to broaden understanding of its essence

Asma Uddin, a professor at Michigan State University’s College of Law, has argued in her writings that many American politicians are depicting ordinary Muslim religious practices — such as prayer, choice of apparel, family counseling and mosque attendance — as evidence of a political danger.

In an interview with the AP, Uddin depicted the current wave of anti-Sharia rhetoric as fearmongering by politicians who view the issue as advantageous for them.

“When politicians use this, it’s giving them exactly what they’re looking for,” she said. “They’re looking for a scapegoat … and this gets people riled up.”

Sabeel Ahmed, who has made three outreach trips to Texas so far this year, plans a trip to Houston in a few weeks for another mosque open-house. He’s also working on a book to be mailed to Christian clergy across the U.S., seeking to broaden their understanding of Sharia and other Islamic practices.

“Islam is not to be feared,” Ahmed said. “People should meet a Muslim, go to the mosque, reach out to us. Let’s emphasize the commonalities we have.”

Crary writes for the Associated Press.

ATLANTA — Security researchers say rapid advances in artificial intelligence are making it more critical to address a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.

The system’s vulnerability has been drawing increased attention, with election security advocates criticizing state election officials for failing to fix it before the November elections. Georgia election officials say they have taken steps to address the potential harm, but some advocates say the state is not going far enough.

The vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That is important because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution, and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.

The development comes in an election season of uncertainty, as President Trump threatens to interfere with the midterms, and he has long demanded that states turn over voter rolls. Georgia has been a particular focus, as Trump continues to deny he lost the state in 2020 to Joe Biden. Earlier this year, the FBI seized ballots cast in that election from a Fulton County election hub.

While the flaw in Georgia has been known for a few years, the widespread adoption of AI tools and the blistering pace of its sophistication have election security experts raising alarms.

This is “a bit of a wake-up call because it illustrates how much more easily vulnerabilities can be exploited now that AI can do all of the technical work for you,” said J. Alex Halderman, a voting technology specialist at the University of Michigan who was part of the team that exposed the flaw.

Other jurisdictions across the country use the same voting equipment made by Liberty Vote, which was known as Dominion Voting Systems before the company was sold. But many have applied a software update to fix the flaw, and some other states do not allow the public release of records that are needed to exploit it, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology.

Georgia, a presidential battleground with one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year, is the only place where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a “perfect storm.”

“It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility,” Lindeman said.

How does voting work in Georgia?

Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots voters insert into scanners to tally the votes.

Such cast-vote records detail the votes from each ballot. Those records and electronic ballot images created by the scanners are randomized. But the software flaw allows them to be put back in the order they were cast, according to a report by researchers who discovered it in 2022.

Along with other publicly available data, that information could be used to match voters to their ballots, the researchers wrote.

Max Springer, a Princeton University researcher who was not involved in the original research and studies AI, said he gave a publicly available AI assistant that research. He said it was able to reverse the shuffling of electronic ballot records from Georgia’s May primary and then tell him what other records it would need to match names to ballots.

He then gave the AI assistant the early voting list for the counties he examined and the cast-vote record file, which could be obtained through a public records request. It was able to create “buckets of ballots and potential voters,” he wrote in a blog post. In many instances, that made it possible to match voters to their ballots.

In cases where ambiguity remained, he wrote, he got the public audit log for the ballot scanners and precinct check-in records and was able to match most ballots to specific voters.

“AI coding tools are essentially supercharging laymen people to exploit vulnerabilities,” Springer said in an interview.

Why does ballot secrecy matter?

Georgia’s Constitution says elections “shall be by secret ballot,” and state law requires voting machines to “permit voting in absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know any other elector’s votes.”

A lack of ballot secrecy can make it easier to buy or sell votes and increase the danger of coercion to vote a certain way by family members, political organizations, employers or government officials. It also is information that could be invaluable to political campaigns.

Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager in the secretary of state’s office, pushed back on the concerns. He said it would be easier to use mail ballots if vote-buying or coercion was the goal and that it probably would be cheaper for campaigns to just increase outreach to voters who fit a certain profile than try to identify voters this way.

State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a rule during the board’s August meeting that would have required the secretary of state’s office to apply the software update recommended by the manufacturer by Tuesday.

“Each [voter] has one vote, and no one is entitled to know how it was cast,” Grubbs said. “That privacy protects more than the individual voter. It protects the integrity of the entire election.”

In a letter to the election board, an agency lawyer argued that the update has not been certified by the secretary of state, the implementation would take months, and the Legislature has not provided necessary funding. The board rejected Grubbs’ proposal. Some members said they did not believe they had the authority to order the secretary of state to act and they raised concerns about the short timeline before the November midterms.

Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, who voted against the proposal, said it is “intensely frustrating” that the software update has not been applied. But she pointed out that it is a felony to reveal how someone voted, which should serve as a deterrent.

“I hate the fact that it’s even physically possible, but there are very, very severe penalties if somebody were to actually do this,” she said.

What’s being done?

The secretary of state’s office sent guidance to county election officials instructing them to refer open records requests for certain records to the secretary of state’s office. It will release them with the problematic information blacked out and decline to release other information and documents.

Sterling said the office is working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they are made public. Halderman said that precaution would be necessary to keep someone from reconstructing the order.

While some other jurisdictions have applied the software update that reportedly fixes the problem, some have done what Georgia is now trying to do by restricting public access to the records needed to exploit the flaw.

Marilyn Marks is executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election transparency and security and raised the alarm about the vulnerability. She argued that withholding documents is not the solution and that steps need to be taken to ensure ballots cannot be traced to voters in the first place.

“When Georgia’s election records contain identifiers that can be used to trace ballots to voters, the only legal and acceptable answer is to stop recording that information — not restrict public access to sensitive unlawful information to insiders and commercial vendors,” she said.

With time growing short before the elections, Marks said a workable interim solution would be to collect ballots in locked boxes at precincts and then shuffle and scan them at a central tabulating center.

Brumback writes for the Associated Press.