ECI reverses stand on searchable rolls; adds no safeguards against misuse it once cited

Senior ECI officials said not publishing the electors’ photographs was the only safeguard against the alleged misuse the commission previously cited

The Election Commission of India (ECI) last week decided to provide political parties with machine-readable draft and final electoral rolls but introduced no new safeguards to address the risks of potential data misuse, which it had cited for years to reject opposition demands, people familiar with the matter said.

In a statement on Thursday, ECI said the electoral registration officer would supply a hard copy and a readable PDF format of the electoral roll of each polling station to every recognised political party after the publication of the draft and final electoral rolls. “For this purpose, readable PDF format shall not have the electors’ photographs,” the commission said.

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Senior ECI officials acknowledged that not publishing the electors’ photographs was the only safeguard against the alleged misuse the commission previously cited. To be sure, voter rolls, even in their current format, do not carry photos of electors.

The decision was a major reversal for ECI, which used to provide political parties with image PDFs earlier. Machine-readable digital copies can be searched and analysed easily, helping political parties check voter names and scrutinise changes.

In June 2025 Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi demanded consolidated, digital and machine-readable voter rolls for the 2024 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections, with version histories and timestamps showing changes to the rolls.

ECI rejected the demand at the time, arguing that providing searchable, machine-readable data exposed voter rolls to data mining, privacy violations, and digital tampering.

Asked what had changed since then, an ECI official said the change in stance was driven by complaints received during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll.

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“The decision was made keeping in mind the complaints ECI received during SIR about using scanned digital copies, which made mapping difficult. Common people and BLOs could have searched their names in voter rolls easily and at a faster pace if machine-readable PDFs were available,” the official said.

A second ECI official said the commission’s approach was previously guided by concerns that handing out readable PDFs would expose them to manipulation.

“People could use that information to create voter rolls to post on social media to show that rolls are manipulated or compromised. That would affect people’s trust in the poll body. But keeping in mind the mapping issues, along with demands of political parties, ECI took the call in the spirit of transparency,” the official said.

Thursday’s order was among a series of decisions taken by ECI after the Indian Express report that two of its three members, election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, recorded at least 14 objections over 10 months to decisions they claimed were made without their knowledge or approval. The objections concerned changes to management of the electoral-roll database and the handling of voter additions, deletions and restorations.

Tens of thousands of people subsequently took to the streets seeking chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation and the scrapping of the electoral roll Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

Former Rajya Sabha MP and Trinamool Congress leader Saket Gokhale questioned why the commission had resisted for so long.

“The ECI should first explain why they were giving out scanned copies of documents until now despite repeated requests for machine-readable files. These documents are all created online and aren’t handwritten. Therefore, it’d have been a lot less effort to provide machine-readable and searchable copies. The fact that they went the extra mile until now to turn them into scanned electronically-unreadable copies proves why its conduct is under scrutiny,” he told HT.