Electoral Rolls in India Available in Machine Readable Format

What is it?

Definition: An electoral register is the formal list of individuals qualified to vote within a constituency.

Authority: Developed and revised under the oversight of the Election Commission of India (ECI) by district-level officials.

Dynamic Characteristics: Frequently refreshed to add new voters, eliminate those who have passed away or moved, and amend inaccuracies.

Access: Available to the public via the EC’s website as PDFs divided into numerous constituency “sections.”

Concerning Machine-Readable Voter Registries

What It Is

Rolls offered in text-searchable formats (text-PDF or Excel/CSV) rather than image-only PDF.

Enables computers to swiftly index, search, and analyze voter information.

Functioning Mechanism

Image PDF = Cannot be digitally searched; only human analysis is effective.

Text PDF/CSV = Allows for computer-driven matching, identifying duplicates, and verifying on a large scale.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) = Transforms scanned image PDFs into text that machines can read, but this process is expensive and requires significant resources (millions of pages across the country).

Reasons EC Ceased the Distribution of Machine-Readable Rolls

Data Privacy Issues – Names and addresses might be exploited by foreign organizations.

2018 SC Case (Kamal Nath v. EC) – Supreme Court declined to force EC to release text-based rolls.

Internal EC Order (2018) – Instructed States to upload solely image-PDFs to safeguard voter identity.

Security Threats – Possible exploitation of searchable information for profiling, monitoring, or targeted political influence.

Political parties can independently convert PDFs using OCR, but it can be expensive and labor-intensive.