Lok Sabha Lop and MP Rahul Gandhi talk about the media after being detained by the police during the Indian leaders of the block protesting against the March to the election commission in Nový Delhi 11 August | Photo Credit: Neither
The story so far: the leader of the opposition Rahul Gandhi, along with the accusations of the “theft of the vote”, demanded that the Electoral Commission (EC) be made available to “machine” voters.
How do voters share?
Election roles are an authoritative list of who is and must not vote in India, and are constantly updated when newly eligible voters register to vote, change addresses or become unfit. Voter roles are prepared under the EC office officials at the level of districts who have access to Eronet, the digital application used by the EC to process applications for new additions to the list of voters or deletion. EC has access to a complete storage of data about each voter in India. They tightened this data by making the “image pdf” files or distributing copies to political parties and the general public. Rolls voters include a photo of all voters, but this photo is not included in PDF images that the EC has on its website. Although these PDF image roles can be examined theoretically, this may prove to be a resource -intensive exercise. Since January, India has more than 99 Crore voters’ records and duplicates can be challenging if a team of human reviewers does not have a long time and a limited geographical sample. This was the case of Mahadevapura of the Bengalur Election District, where Congress was able to find 11,965 duplicate records.
However, if “PDF” files are available, the text can be indexed and searched by creating information formatting. Without such machine -readable roles, the opposition claims that incorrect and duplicate records will be more difficult to find. PG Bhat, activist Bengaluru, analyzed machine -readable roles before 2018 to emphasize irregular accessories.
Why doesn’t EC provide the same thing?
One year before the elections in 2019, EC ordered the main election officers at the state level to stop recording machine -readable roles on their website. OP Rawat, the then Chief Election Commissioner, said Hindu that it had happened to avoid foreign countries in access to voter data that could detect the entire names and addresses of the Indians. In the Indian Commission of Kamal Nath Versus, the Election Commission in 2018 refused to induce EC to provide machine -readable data on the electoral role. This was despite the EC’s own manual, which states that “the role proposal will be included in the website (main election officers) in text mode”. However, the court noted: “It can be added that if the petitioner wants, he can always transfer (voters’ lists) to a searchable regime that, of course, requires to make his own efforts.”
The main technology for the conversion of scanned or unscrupulous PDF documents to the analyzable format is the recognition of optical characters (OCR), ten -year technology. However, there are friction points that make such an analysis demanding: on the EC website, voters are divided into hundreds of “parts” for each constituency, each of which is a separate PDF document. In addition to the intensity of file sources, the OCR to make such a massive number of pages-six crore for all the roles of voters in the country, based on a gross estimate-stating around $ 40,000 for a summary revision (according to the indicative price of the Google document).
Can digital voters roll fraud?
Mr. Gandhi claimed that having a search would make duplicate items easier. Srinivas Kodali, lawyer and transparency activist said that “there is a risk” in the publication of roles, but that EC behavior required further transparency. “If the OCR ability exists with political parties anyway, the question is whether we could also publish it,” said Mr. Kodali.
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Published – August 21, 2025 08:30
