Context: Recently, the Leader of Opposition alleged vote theft and demanded that the Election Commission (EC) provide machine-readable voter rolls to political parties.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: About Machine Readable Electoral Rolls.
What are Electoral Rolls?
- Electoral Roll is the authoritative list of all eligible voters prepared under the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
- Voter rolls are prepared by district officials under the EC’s authority using ERONET, a digital system for adding or deleting voter entries. They are regularly updated to include newly eligible voters, address changes, or removals of ineligible voters.
How are Voter Rolls shared?
- The Election Commission shares electoral rolls mainly as image PDF files on its website. These PDFs include details like name, age, gender, address, and EPIC number, but do not include photographs online.
- Physical copies or printouts may also be provided to political parties and the public.
- Limitations:
- Image PDFs cannot be easily indexed or searched by computers.
- Detecting duplicates requires manual effort, and with over 99 crore entries, spotting errors becomes highly challenging.
Opposition parties are demanding machine-readable voter rolls, as these would allow data to be searched, indexed, and analysed by computers, enabling quick detection of duplicate or bogus entries across constituencies and facilitating large-scale analysis for greater accuracy and fairness.
Why does the EC not provide Machine-Readable Voter Rolls?
- Privacy risks: The EC stopped uploading machine-readable rolls before the 2019 elections citing privacy risks - foreign entities can access sensitive details such as the full names and addresses of Indian voters.
- In Kamal Nath vs Election Commission of India (2018), the Supreme Court refused to compel the EC to provide machine-readable rolls. The Court observed that political parties could convert the existing image PDFs into searchable format on their own if they wished.
- This position, however, contradicted the EC’s own manual which states that draft rolls should be published on State CEO websites in “text mode.”
- Technical and financial barriers: Voter rolls are divided into hundreds of separate PDF parts for each constituency, making large-scale analysis difficult. Converting these files through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is resource-intensive; with over six crore pages nationwide, the estimated cost is about $40,000 per revision cycle.