The Election Commission of India (ECI) has reversed its long-standing position on sharing machine-readable electoral rolls with political parties, directing officials to provide searchable PDF copies of draft and final voter lists. However, the move has not been accompanied by new safeguards against potential data misuse, a concern the poll body had repeatedly cited to reject similar demands in the past, people familiar with the matter said.
Under the directive issued last Thursday, electoral registration officers must provide every recognised political party with a hard copy and a readable PDF of the electoral roll for each polling station after publication of the draft and final rolls. The commission clarified that the digital versions would not contain electors’ photographs.
Senior ECI officials acknowledged that excluding photographs was the only safeguard against the alleged misuse of electoral data that the commission had previously highlighted. Voter rolls in their existing format also do not carry photographs of electors.
The decision marks a departure from the ECI’s earlier practice of providing political parties with image-based PDFs. Machine-readable files can be searched, sorted and analysed more easily, allowing parties to verify names and examine changes in voter lists.
SIR complaints prompted change in approach
An ECI official said the commission changed its position after receiving complaints during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Scanned digital copies had made it difficult to map and verify voter details, the official said.
“The decision was made keeping in mind the complaints ECI received during SIR about using scanned digital copies, which made mapping difficult,” the official said, adding that searchable PDFs would allow members of the public and booth-level officers (BLOs) to locate names more quickly.
A second official said the commission had earlier feared that readable electoral rolls could be manipulated and circulated on social media to suggest that voter lists had been compromised. Such claims, the official argued, could undermine public confidence in the poll body.
However, the official said the difficulties encountered during voter mapping, along with demands from political parties, prompted the commission to take the decision in the interest of transparency.
Congress had sought digital rolls in 2025
The issue had come to the fore in June 2025, when Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi demanded consolidated, digital and machine-readable electoral rolls for the 2024 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections.
Their demands also included version histories and timestamps to show when and how changes had been made to the voter lists.
The ECI rejected the request at the time, arguing that searchable, machine-readable data could expose electoral rolls to data mining, privacy violations and digital tampering. The commission’s latest decision has renewed questions over why those concerns no longer outweigh the need for easier access to voter information.
Decision follows objections over electoral roll management
The directive was among a series of decisions taken by the ECI after an Indian Express report revealed that election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had recorded at least 14 objections over a period of 10 months to decisions they alleged were taken without their knowledge or approval.
The objections reportedly concerned changes to the management of the electoral-roll database and the handling of voter additions, deletions and restorations.
The report was followed by protests in several places, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the scrapping of the SIR exercise.
The controversy has intensified scrutiny of the commission’s handling of electoral rolls, including concerns over transparency, the accuracy of voter records and the process through which names are added or removed.
Saket Gokhale questions delay in providing searchable files
Trinamool Congress leader and former Rajya Sabha MP Saket Gokhale questioned why the ECI had continued providing scanned copies despite repeated requests for machine-readable documents.
“The ECI should first explain why they were giving out scanned copies of documents until now despite repeated requests for machine-readable files,” Gokhale told Hindustan Times.
He argued that the documents were generated digitally and were not handwritten, making it easier for the commission to provide searchable versions from the outset.
“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 said.
The ECI’s latest directive is intended to make voter verification and mapping easier during the revision exercise. However, questions remain over how the commission will address the risks of data misuse that it had previously cited while resisting demands for searchable electoral rolls.