Machine-Readable Electoral Rolls and Fraud Spots

Understanding ‘Machine-Readable’ Electoral Rolls

• Electoral rolls are the authoritative list of who can vote in India.

• They are prepared by district level officials using ERONET, a digital application.

• The EC has access to the full repository of voter data on every voter in India.

• The EC makes this data accessible through ‘image PDF’ files or printouts to political parties and the public.

Challenges in Scrutinizing ‘Image PDF’ Rolls

• Scrutinizing image PDF rolls can be resource-intensive due to the large number of voter roll entries in India.

• Spotting duplicates can be challenging unless a team of human reviewers has a long period of time.

The Need for ‘Text PDF’ Files

• ‘Text PDF’ files can be indexed and searched by a computer, making information formatting more straightforward.

• Without such rolls, malfeasance and duplicate entries will be harder to spot.

Why the EC won’t provide machine-readable electoral roll data?

• The EC ordered State-level Chief Electoral Officers to stop uploading machine-readable rolls to prevent foreign countries from accessing voter roll data.

• The Supreme Court in Kamal Nath versus Election Commission of India refused to compel the EC to provide machine-readable electoral roll data.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) as a Solution

• OCR is the main technology to convert scanned or un-searchable PDF documents into an analysable format.

• The cost of performing OCR on over six crore voter rolls in the country would be around $40,000 per summary revision list.

The Potential of Digital Voter Rolls

• While there is a risk in making rolls public, the EC’s conduct necessitates further transparency.

Digital Voter List Integrity is important topic for Civil service exam (WBCS).

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