What is Machine-Readable Voter Rolls?

Why in the News ? In the wake of accusations of ‘vote theft’ from the Congress, Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi has called for the Election Commission (EC) to make machine-readable voter rolls available to all parties.

How are voter rolls distributed?

• Electoral rolls are the official roll of voters who can vote in India. They are updated continuously as new voters enroll, voters move residence, or become ineligible.
• These rolls are made by district-level officers under the EC authority using ERONET, a computer application which carries out additions and removals in the electoral roll.
• The EC has the entire database of voters and distributes it to political parties and the people through:
• Image PDF files hosted on its website.
• Printed copies provided on demand.
• Voter rolls also have photos of every voter, but they are not printed in the PDF copies posted on the web.
• Though image PDFs can, in theory, be checked, this is very manpower-intensive. Up to January 2025, India has more than 99 crore voter records, so it would be difficult to identify duplicate or forged records without considerable human effort.
• For instance, in Bengaluru’s Mahadevapura constituency, Congress found 11,965 duplicate records, but only after tedious manual verification.
• On the other hand, text PDF files (machine-readable rolls) would enable computers to easily index and search voter data, and thus detect irregularities faster. Before 2018, activists such as P.G. Bhat employed machine-readable rolls to point out irregular additions and deletions.

Why won’t the EC offer machine-readable rolls?

• In 2018, a year prior to the general elections, the EC asked State Chief Electoral Officers to discontinue uploading machine-readable rolls.
• the former Chief Election Commissioner, O.P. Rawat has asserted that this move was made to avoid foreign entities gaining access to sensitive voter information like full names and addresses of Indian citizens.
• In the same year, in Kamal Nath vs. Election Commission of India, the Supreme Court declined to order the EC to furnish machine-readable rolls, even though the EC’s own manual at the time said that the “draft roll shall be put on [Chief Electoral Officers‘] website.

What is A Machine-Readable Voter Roll?

It  is a voter roll (list of electors) published in electronic text form (e.g., text-based PDF, CSV, or Excel spreadsheet) instead of a scanned image PDF or paper form.

Key Features of Machine-Readable Voter Rolls:

• Searchable & Indexable – Computers can read the text directly, allowing one to search quickly for names, addresses, or voter IDs.
• Data Processing – Dupes can be easily identified, bogus entries, or incomplete information by software without the need for manual verification.
• Transparency – Researchers, political parties, as well as civil society organizations, are able to analyze rolls effectively.
• Effective Scrutiny – It is capable of detecting discrepancies earlier, even in extensive voter lists (India alone has over 99 crore voters).

Example:

• When the roll is available in image PDF (scanned), a person will have to verify each entry manually, which takes time.
• If the roll is machine-readable, then a computer program will be able to detect such instances automatically, for instance, one person being registered in two constituencies.