The story so far: Along with the allegations of ‘vote theft’ by the Congress, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi has demanded that “machine readable” voter rolls be made available to all political parties by the Election Commission (EC).
Electoral rolls are the authoritative list of who is and isn’t allowed to vote in India, and they are continuously updated when newly eligible voters register to vote, change addresses, or become ineligible. Voter rolls are prepared under the EC’s authority by district level officials, who have access to ERONET, a digital application used by the EC to process applications for new additions to the voter list, or deletions. The EC has access to the full repository of data on every voter in India. They make this data accessible by making ‘image PDF’ files available, or by handing out printouts to political parties and the general public. Voter rolls include a photo of all voters, but this photo is not included in the image PDF files that the EC has on its website. While these image PDF rolls can be scrutinised in theory, this can turn out to be a resource-intensive exercise in practice. India has over 99 crore voter roll entries as of this January, and spotting duplicates can be challenging unless a team of human reviewers has a long period of time, and a limited geographic sample. That was the case in the Mahadevapura constituency of Bengaluru, where the Congress was able to spot 11,965 duplicate entries.
