The ECI compliance checklist most campaigns discover too late

Every election pamphlet, poster or handbill must carry the printer's name and address and the publisher's name and address, and the printer must file a declaration with the district magistrate. No exceptions for a small run, a reprint or a design change. The most common failure is a last-minute artwork revision that drops the imprint block. Lock it into the template before design begins and make it a checklist item at press approval.

Once the Model Code of Conduct is in force, political advertisements on electronic media — including bulk SMS, voice calls, and social media advertising — require pre-certification from the Media Certification and Monitoring Committee. Campaigns routinely learn this three days before a blast and lose a week. Build in ten working days.

Separate from ECI: TRAI's DLT framework requires entity registration, sender header approval and per-template content approval before any bulk SMS is delivered. Entity registration is 2–5 working days, headers 1–3, each template 1–2. Campaigns that skip it end up sending through an unregistered route at single-digit delivery and paying for messages nobody received.

Every campaign vehicle needs written permission from the returning officer with the permit displayed inside the vehicle, and loudspeaker use has time-window restrictions that vary by state and district. An unpermitted vehicle is one of the most common notices we see, and the liability sits with the candidate, not the vendor.

Digital advertising, printing, vehicles, event costs and star campaigner logistics are all reportable election expenditure, valued against the district rate schedule. Meta and Google publish political ad spend publicly, so under-reporting digital is trivially detectable by anyone who cares to look. Maintain a running ledger with invoices from day one — reconstructing it in the final week is how discrepancies get created.

Campaign publicity must stop 48 hours before polling closes. That includes scheduled SMS, IVR blasts, WhatsApp broadcasts and boosted posts. Automated sends that fire during the silence period because nobody paused the scheduler are an entirely self-inflicted category of violation, and we have seen it happen to serious campaigns.