Machine-readable rolls in elections: The credibility of India’s elections rests on the trust that every legitimate vote is counted and every illegitimate one excluded. That trust has come under renewed strain after Rahul Gandhi alleged large-scale manipulation, pointing to instances where teams had to comb through seven feet of printed rolls for a single assembly segment and spend months identifying fake or duplicate entries. His charge was not only about the presence of ineligible voters but also about the Election Commission of India’s reluctance to provide the data in a format that would allow rapid, independent verification.
These allegations land in a political climate where doubts about the integrity of the electoral process have persisted for years. Questions over electronic voting machines, the opacity of electoral bonds, and the accuracy of voter rolls have together eroded public confidence in the neutrality of electoral institutions. While the ECI continues to affirm the robustness of its processes, the combination of opaque data formats and limited avenues for independent audit fuels suspicion that systemic flaws — whether through negligence or design — are not being addressed with the urgency they demand.
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The case for machine-readable rolls
A machine-readable electoral roll is a dataset in a structured digital format that can be easily processed and analysed by computer programs. Unlike scanned PDFs or image files — often used by the ECI — which require laborious and error-prone optical character recognition (OCR), machine-readable formats allow direct searching, filtering, and cross-referencing in seconds.
This technical shift is not about convenience alone. It enables systematic detection of duplicate entries (same name, age, and relation details in multiple constituencies) and anomalous entries (implausible names, missing relation fields). In a country with 968.8 million registered voters as of February 2024, manual verification is unworkable. Allowing political parties, civil society, and even citizens to scrutinise the rolls computationally would multiply the eyes on the list, making large-scale manipulation harder to execute and easier to expose.
Globally, democracies make their rolls available in searchable formats, often with anonymisation safeguards. These jurisdictions have found that transparency strengthens, not weakens, electoral legitimacy.
Constitutional and legal foundations
The Indian Constitution under Article 324 vests the ECI with the “superintendence, direction and control” of elections, including preparation of electoral rolls. This is reinforced by the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which grants every citizen over 18 the statutory right to be enrolled and to challenge wrongful inclusions or exclusions.
The law already provides a mechanism, Form 7, for objections to entries in the draft rolls. But in practice, the short window between the draft’s publication and the finalisation of the rolls makes this right illusory unless data is in a format that can be rapidly analysed.
In 2018, the Supreme Court held that political parties do not have a right to demand publication in a specific format. Yet, the Court did not forbid such publication — it left the choice to the ECI. In other words, there is no legal bar to providing machine-readable data; it is purely a matter of policy. The ECI’s refusal is not mandated by law, but by an institutional preference for control over openness.
The ECI’s stated concerns
The ECI’s primary argument is that machine-readable rolls could be misused for voter profiling or manipulation. There is also an apprehension that inconsistencies in the rolls could be weaponised to undermine confidence in elections.
These concerns are not without basis. Electoral data, if linked with other datasets, could breach privacy. But global experience shows that these risks can be mitigated—by excluding sensitive fields such as exact addresses or photographs from the public dataset, while still enabling verification of duplicates through anonymised unique identifiers.
The more troubling development is the ECI’s apparent retreat from even partially searchable formats. In Bihar, a draft roll released on August 1, 2024, was largely machine-readable but was swiftly replaced with a non-searchable PDF after political allegations. The Commission offered no public explanation. This opacity feeds suspicion that data presentation choices are being shaped by political pressures rather than by the Commission’s constitutional duty to maintain public trust.
Technology and the transparency deficit
The ECI maintains sophisticated internal systems to detect duplicates across constituencies. But these tools are not shared with political parties or the public. Instead, parties and citizens are left to comb through seven-foot paper printouts or fuzzy PDFs, a process that consumes months and yields limited results.
Data experts note that poor-quality scans make OCR unreliable, and artificial intelligence tools cannot extract text where there is none to read. The problem is not a lack of AI capability, but the Commission’s choice of format. In effect, technology is being used to limit transparency rather than expand it.
In democracies that publish machine-readable rolls, open scrutiny has produced positive outcomes: cleaner rolls, quicker removal of ineligible voters, and fewer post-election disputes. The transparency dividend outweighs the manageable risks.
Some countries have robust electoral integrity and offer instructive models. In the United States, many states publish voter registration databases with anonymised IDs and precinct-level data, allowing cross-verification while protecting personal details. Estonia has a fully digital electoral system. It uses encrypted machine-readable rolls accessible to authorised observers. In Australia, the rolls are available for inspection in digital form to parties and candidates, enabling mass verification.
These examples show that openness and security are not mutually exclusive. Formats can be standardised, personal identifiers masked, and access tiered—public, party, and authorised watchdogs—to balance transparency with privacy.
A policy prescription for the ECI
The ECI can take immediate steps to align with global best practice while addressing legitimate privacy concerns. It can publish electoral rolls in standardised formats such as CSV or JSON, with consistent field labels for name, age, relation, and constituency codes. Sensitive can be masked, removed, or anonymise fields that could be misused for profiling — such as full addresses — while retaining enough to detect duplicates.
It can offer a tiered access system. It can provide political parties, accredited observers, and civil society groups with enhanced datasets under non-disclosure agreements, while offering the public a slightly restricted version. It should allow independent audits of the roll-cleaning process and publish periodic reports on deletions, additions, and corrections. It can seek a statutory amendment to enshrine the right to machine-readable rolls, insulating the process from executive or judicial reversals.
Rebuilding confidence in democracy
The demand for machine-readable electoral rolls is not a partisan tactic; it is a structural reform essential for a democracy of India’s size and complexity. Denying the public and political stakeholders the ability to meaningfully scrutinise the rolls fosters suspicion and leaves the Commission vulnerable to allegations of bias or incompetence.
India’s electoral system has been a source of national pride. But pride must be matched by vigilance. In the age of data, hiding information in formats that frustrate analysis is not neutrality—it is opacity. The ECI has the constitutional authority and the technological capability to lead by example, embracing openness without compromising security.
In the coming months, as political rhetoric intensifies ahead of state and national polls, the Commission’s choices will signal whether it intends to be a guardian of democratic transparency or merely a manager of electoral logistics. A decisive shift to machine-readable rolls, with built-in privacy protections, would not only address present concerns but also strengthen the institutional legitimacy of the ECI for decades to come.