The Election Commission of India ( ECI ) last week decided to provide political parties with machine-readable draft and final electoral rolls but introduced no new safeguards to address the risks of potential data misuse, which it had cited for years to reject opposition demands, people familiar with the matter said.
Former Rajya Sabha MP and Trinamool Congress leader Saket Gokhale questioned why the commission had resisted for so long.
“For this purpose, readable PDF format shall not have the electors’ photographs,” the commission said. In a statement on Thursday, ECI said the electoral registration officer would supply a hard copy and a readable PDF format of the electoral roll of each polling station to every recognised political party after the publication of the draft and final electoral rolls.
“The decision was made keeping in mind the complaints ECI received during SIR about using scanned digital copies, which made mapping difficult. “People could use that information to create voter rolls to post on social media to show that rolls are manipulated or compromised. That would affect people’s trust in the poll body.
In June 2025 Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi demanded consolidated, digital and machine-readable voter rolls for the 2024 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections, with version histories and timestamps showing changes to the rolls.
Asked what had changed since then, an ECI official said the change in stance was driven by complaints received during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll. Common people and BLOs could have searched their names in voter rolls easily and at a faster pace if machine-readable PDFs were available,” the official said. A second ECI official said the commission’s approach was previously guided by concerns that handing out readable PDFs would expose them to manipulation. But keeping in mind the mapping issues, along with demands of political parties, ECI took the call in the spirit of transparency,” the official said.
