Election Commission and Elections: Article 324, Composition, and the CEC Act, 2023

Every general election, every by-election, and the election of the President and Vice-President run through one body: the Election Commission of India (ECI), a constitutional body created by Article 324. This chapter is really about three things UPSC keeps testing: how the Commission is composed and has changed shape over time, how its members are appointed since a real 2023 law finally governs that process, and the asymmetric way a Chief Election Commissioner can be removed compared with an ordinary Election Commissioner. A fourth thread, which bodies get confused with the ECI, rounds out the chapter's usual traps.

This chapter's material overlaps with NCERT Class 11, Indian Constitution at Work, Chapter 3 (Election and Representation). This note goes further than that chapter's coverage.

Article 324: what the Election Commission does, and does not, superintend

Article 324(1), which opens Part XV of the Constitution ("Elections"), vests in the Election Commission "the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of the electoral rolls for, and the conduct of, all elections to Parliament and to the Legislature of every State and of elections to the offices of President and Vice-President." Four things, and only four: Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha elections, State Legislative Assembly and Council elections, and the Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections.

What Article 324 does not cover is just as testable: elections to Panchayats and Municipalities. Those run through a separate constitutional body, the State Election Commission, created state by state under Article 243K (Panchayats) and Article 243ZA (Municipalities, which simply borrows the 243K machinery). A State Election Commission is headed by a single State Election Commissioner, appointed by the Governor, not the President, and is a distinct body in every state, never a branch office of the ECI. This distinction, and one more against the Delimitation Commission, gets its own section further down.

The Election Commission of India is a permanent constitutional body, established on 25 January 1950, days before the Constitution itself came into force, and it celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 2001.

Composition: one Commissioner, then three, then one, then three again

For nearly forty years, the Election Commission was, in practice, a one-person body: a single Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), with no other Election Commissioners (ECs) alongside him. Article 324(2) always allowed for more, stating that the Commission "shall consist of the Chief Election Commissioner and such number of other Election Commissioners, if any, as the President may from time to time fix," but for decades the President simply fixed that number at zero.

That changed, reversed, and changed back again in a short, genuinely testable stretch of the late 1980s and early 1990s:

• On 16 October 1989, two additional Election Commissioners were appointed for the first time, alongside the sitting CEC, making the Commission a three-member body for the first time in its history.
• That arrangement barely lasted: on 1 January 1990, the two EC posts were abolished, and the Commission reverted to being a single-member body again.
• The multi-member structure returned for good on 1 October 1993, when two additional Election Commissioners were appointed once more. The Commission has functioned as a three-member body, one CEC and two ECs, continuously since that date.

Today's Commission, then, is the CEC plus two Election Commissioners. A detail worth holding onto precisely: nothing in the Constitution itself fixes the number at three forever; Article 324(2) leaves that number to the President "from time to time." Three has simply been the standing practice since October 1993.

On power within the Commission, the exam-relevant fact is that a CEC does not outrank an EC in decision-making. The ECI's own description of its working is that "all Election Commissioners have equal say in the decision making of the Commission," and the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023 makes this a matter of law, not just convention: Commission business is, as far as possible, transacted unanimously, and where the CEC and the ECs differ, "such matter shall be decided according to the opinion of the majority." This is a real and common trap: unlike, say, a body where a chairperson holds a tie-breaking casting vote, the CEC here is simply one vote among three, outvotable by the two ECs together, even though the earlier appointment (see below) still carries the label "Chief."

Appointment: Article 324(2), Anoop Baranwal, and the CEC Act, 2023

Article 324(2) has always said that CEC and EC appointments are made by the President "subject to the provisions of any law made in that behalf by Parliament." For seventy-plus years, Parliament made no such law, so the President appointed the CEC and ECs on the advice of the Union Council of Ministers, with no statutorily prescribed selection process at all. This gap is exactly what a 2023 Supreme Court case, and the law that followed it, finally closed.

Anoop Baranwal vs Union of India (Writ Petition (Civil) No. 104 of 2015), decided on 2 March 2023 by a five-judge Constitution Bench (Justices K.M. Joseph, Ajay Rastogi, Aniruddha Bose, Hrishikesh Roy, and C.T. Ravikumar), addressed this legislative vacuum. The Court held that, until Parliament enacted a law under Article 324(2), the CEC and ECs would be appointed by the President on the advice of a three-member committee of the Prime Minister, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha (or, absent a recognised Leader of Opposition, the leader of the single largest opposition party), and the Chief Justice of India. The judgment was explicit that this court-devised arrangement was an interim fix, to "continue to hold good till a law is made by Parliament."

Parliament supplied that law before the end of the same year: the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023 (Act No. 49 of 2023). It was passed by the Rajya Sabha on 12 December 2023 and the Lok Sabha on 21 December 2023, received Presidential assent on 28 December 2023, and came into force on 2 January 2024, repealing the earlier Election Commission (Conditions of Service of Election Commissioners and Transaction of Business) Act, 1991.

The Act's Selection Committee, set out in Section 7, is where the single most tested, most controversial change sits. It consists of:

• the Prime Minister, as Chairperson;
• the Leader of Opposition in the House of the People (Lok Sabha), as Member, with the same fallback the Court itself had used: if there is no recognised Leader of Opposition, the leader of the single largest opposition party is deemed to hold that role; and
• a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister, as Member.

Set this against the interim Anoop Baranwal committee above, and the change is precise and real: the enacted law drops the Chief Justice of India from the panel, replacing that seat with a Union Cabinet Minister of the Prime Minister's own choosing. The Selection Committee is not invalidated merely because a seat on it is vacant or defectively constituted (Section 7(2)), and it may consider names beyond whatever list it is handed (Section 8(2)).

That list comes from a separate Search Committee (Section 6), headed by the Union Minister of Law and Justice with two other members not below Secretary rank, who prepare a panel of five names for the Selection Committee. Candidates must hold, or have held, a post equivalent to Secretary to the Government of India, be persons of integrity, with election-management experience (Section 5). The President formally appoints the CEC and ECs by warrant under hand and seal (Section 4).

Tenure, salary, and the removal asymmetry

Under Section 9 of the 2023 Act, the CEC and every EC hold office for a term of six years from the date they assume office, or until they turn sixty-five, whichever is earlier, and are not eligible for re-appointment. If a sitting EC is later elevated to CEC, the two stints are added together and capped at six years in aggregate, not six years in each role.

Salary is a genuinely interesting controversy-and-reversal, both parts checkable. The Bill as introduced in August 2023 proposed pegging CEC and EC salary and conditions of service to the Cabinet Secretary, a real downgrade from the 1991 Act it was replacing, which had pegged them to a Supreme Court judge, and this drew criticism as diluting the Commission's independence. Before final passage, the government moved its own amendments in the Rajya Sabha (11 December 2023) restoring the earlier parity, and the Act as actually passed pays the CEC and ECs "a salary which is equal to the salary of a Judge of the Supreme Court" (Section 10(1)), with dearness allowance also pegged to a Supreme Court judge (Section 10(3)). The lesson for the exam: know the enacted position, not the introduced Bill's, since the two differ on more than one point.

The removal provision is the chapter's best-known trap, and it is worth stating with precision because the asymmetry is real, not a simplification. Article 324(5)'s two provisos, restated in Section 11(2) and 11(3) of the 2023 Act, read:

• The Chief Election Commissioner shall not be removed from office except in like manner and on the like grounds as a Judge of the Supreme Court. In practice this means the same process as a Supreme Court judge's removal: a Presidential order following an address by each House of Parliament, passed by a special majority, on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity. It is a deliberately high bar, designed to insulate the CEC from executive pressure.
• An Election Commissioner, by contrast, can be removed by the President simply on the recommendation of the Chief Election Commissioner, with no Parliamentary process at all.

So the CEC enjoys the strongest removal protection the Constitution offers any officeholder, while an ordinary EC's job security ultimately runs through the CEC's own recommendation, a genuinely asymmetric safeguard inside the same three-member body. This exact pairing, one member almost unremovable and the other two removable on that first member's say-so, is precisely the kind of two-part fact UPSC likes to split into a true/false pair across a single question.

One further 2023 addition: Section 16, inserted in the same round of amendments, gives the CEC and ECs immunity from civil or criminal proceedings for acts or words in the discharge of official duty, a new protection absent from the 1991 Act it replaced.

What the Election Commission actually does

Beyond composition and appointment, the chapter also expects you to know the Commission's real functions with some precision, since several of them are frequently confused with jobs that actually belong to other bodies.

• Electoral rolls. Preparing and revising the electoral rolls for every constituency is an Article 324(1) function in the Commission's own right, not delegated to anyone else.
• Election schedules. The Commission alone decides when elections are held, in how many phases, and the dates of nomination, polling and counting, insulated from executive direction once the process begins.
• Constituency boundaries: not the ECI's job. Redrawing the boundaries of Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies is done by a separate, freestanding statutory body, the Delimitation Commission, set up afresh after each Census under its own Act (Delimitation Acts: 1952, 1962, 1972, 2002; the current map still rests on the 2001 Census under the 2002 Act). The ECI administers elections within whatever boundaries the Delimitation Commission has fixed; it does not draw them itself. More on this distinction below.
• Registering and recognising political parties, allotting symbols. Parties register with the Commission under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, and are granted "recognised" status at the state or national level based on poll performance against criteria the Commission itself prescribes. Symbols are allotted under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, an order the Commission issues under its own rule-making power, not a fresh Act of Parliament. When a recognised party splits into rival factions and both sides claim the party's name and symbol, the Election Commission decides the dispute, a quasi-judicial function. This note does not name a specific recent split, since such details date quickly, but the function itself, and the fact that it sits with the ECI rather than a court, is what the exam tests.
• The Model Code of Conduct. One of the most misunderstood facts in the chapter: the Model Code of Conduct has no direct statutory backing. It is not an Act of Parliament; no single provision of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 enacts it wholesale. It took shape and operates by consensus among political parties themselves, enforced through the Commission's own moral and administrative authority. A statement asserting the Model Code is "a law passed by Parliament" is a very common, and very wrong, distractor.
• Advisory jurisdiction on disqualification. The Commission has advisory jurisdiction over the post-election disqualification of sitting MPs and MLAs, for instance where a person found guilty of a corrupt election practice comes before the Supreme Court or a High Court. Its opinion on whether, and for how long, such a person should be disqualified is binding on the President or Governor to whom it is tendered.

The exam's real trap: three bodies that sound alike

Three institutions get bundled together in a badly worded question almost every year, and each is genuinely distinct:

Two things are worth holding onto here. First, the Election Commission of India has no role at all in local body elections; that job belongs entirely to each state's own State Election Commission, never to the ECI. Second, the removal-protection language is a close, deliberate parallel the exam likes to swap: the CEC is protected like a Supreme Court judge, a State Election Commissioner like a High Court judge, mirroring the general pattern of Union-level offices pegged to the Supreme Court and state-level equivalents to a High Court. A question that quietly substitutes one court for the other in either proviso is testing exactly this pairing.

Quick revision points

• The Election Commission of India is a permanent constitutional body under Article 324, superintending elections to Parliament, State Legislatures, and the offices of President and Vice-President only, not Panchayat or Municipal elections (those go through the separate State Election Commission, Article 243K/243ZA).
• Composition history: single CEC (1950 to 15 October 1989), three-member (16 October 1989 to 1 January 1990), single-member again (to 30 September 1993), three-member continuously since 1 October 1993.
• All Election Commissioners have equal say; disagreements are settled by majority, and the CEC has no casting vote.
• Before the CEC and Other ECs Act, 2023, no Parliament-made law governed CEC/EC appointment; the Anoop Baranwal judgment (2 March 2023) filled that gap on an interim basis with a committee of the PM, the Leader of Opposition, and the CJI, to hold until Parliament legislated.
• The 2023 Act's Selection Committee is the Prime Minister (Chairperson), the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister, fed by a Search Committee headed by the Union Minister of Law and Justice. The CJI is not on either committee.
• Term: six years, or age 65, whichever is earlier; no re-appointment. Salary, as finally enacted, is equal to a Supreme Court judge's (after an amendment reversed the introduced Bill's proposal to peg it to the Cabinet Secretary).
• The removal asymmetry is the chapter's classic trap: the CEC can only be removed like a Supreme Court judge; an ordinary EC can be removed by the President on the CEC's own recommendation alone.
• Constituency boundaries are drawn by the separate Delimitation Commission, a temporary statutory body reconstituted after each Census, never by the ECI itself.
• The Model Code of Conduct has no direct statutory backing; it runs on consensus among political parties, not an Act of Parliament.

Once the composition history, the 2023 Act's committees, and the CEC/EC removal asymmetry are second nature, work through this site's practice questions to pressure-test that recall under real exam conditions.