Plea at Madras High Court seeks making Election Commission of India website, polling stations universally accessible to the disabled

The Madras High Court, on Tuesday (September 16, 2025), sought the response of Election Commission of India (ECI) to a public interest litigation (PIL) petition which complained that the ECI’s website and many polling stations were not universally accessible thereby depriving the disabled persons their valuable right to vote.

First Division Bench of Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and Justice G. Arul Murugan directed ECI standing counsel Niranjan Rajagopalan to take notice and file a reply within four weeks. The judges asked the ECI not to consider it as an adversarial litigation since it had been filed for a genuine cause.

‘Litigant Vaishnavi is the best person to espouse the cause’

Pointing out that the litigant Vaishnavi Jayakumar, a cross disability rights activist, was the best person to espouse the cause of the disabled, the judges took a look at some photographs produced by her counsel S. Tanvi and asked how the disabled could be expected to climb steps to cast their votes.

“We will take this matter seriously. You (ECI) have already taken many steps for making polling stations universally accessible but you must also ensure that these kind of physical accessibility barriers are removed completely wherever they exist,” the Chief Justice told Mr. Rajagopalan.

The plea

In her affidavit, Ms. Jayakumar stated that Section 11 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 requires all polling stations to be accessible to persons with disabilities and all materials related to the electoral process to be made easily understandable and accessible to them.

Despite such a statutory mandate in place for over seven years since the enforcement of the legislation and repeated requests made to the ECI, neither all the polling booths had been made universally accessible nor the information on the ECI website had been made accessible, free from all barriers, to the disabled, she said.

“The present writ petition is filed aggrieved inter alia by the fact that polling stations and websites of ECI, to even verify a voter’s status and the candidates lists, are not universally accessible, thereby depriving persons with disability and other mobility impaired persons their valuable right to vote,” her affidavit read.

ECI website must have multi-modal CAPTCHAs: Petitioner

The petitioner said websites such as www.eci.gov.in, https://electoralsearch.eci.gov.in, https://voters.eci.gov.in and officials.eci.gov.in have only a single image based CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Pulic Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) instead of multi-modal CAPTCHAs that must also include audio, text, logic and OTP options.

“The respondent (ECI) is the authority to conduct elections in the country and by taking simple measures like making candidate information available in an accessible form online, ensuring accessible ramps at polling booths etc., the entire process can be made barrier-free and legally compliant,” the petitioner said.