Machine Readable Electoral Rolls in India:
The Opposition have demanded machine-readable electoral rolls from the Election Commission (EC), arguing that searchable formats are vital to detect duplicate or fraudulent entries.
- Machine-Readable Electoral Rolls is Rolls provided in text-searchable format (text-PDF or Excel/CSV) instead of image-only PDF.
- Allows computers to index, search, and analyse voter data quickly.
- Working Mechanism : Image PDF = Cannot be searched digitally; only human scrutiny works.
- Text PDF/CSV = Enables computer-based matching, duplicate detection, and large-scale verification.
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition) = Converts scanned image PDFs into machine-readable text, but this is costly and resource-intensive (millions of pages nationwide).
- Electoral Rolls is An electoral roll is the official list of citizens eligible to vote in a constituency. Prepared and updated under the supervision of the Election Commission of India (ECI) through district-level officials. Updated regularly to include new voters, remove deceased or shifted individuals, and correct errors. Publicly available through the EC’s website in the form of PDFs split into hundreds of constituency “parts.”
