Gaurav Gogoi asks ECI for machine-readable voter lists in Assembly polls

Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president Gaurav Gogoi on Thursday pressed the Election Commission of India (ECI) to swiftly introduce machine-readable electoral rolls for all upcoming Assembly polls, beginning with the elections in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Puducherry.

“India is the world’s IT superpower, yet our voter lists are prepared manually by booth-level officers and this outdated system has become the biggest gateway for large-scale manipulation and insertion of fake voters’’, Gogoi told reporters in Assam's Jorhat, arguing that antiquated procedures were undermining public trust in the electoral process.

He pointed out that Congress MP and Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has consistently pushed for machine-readable voter lists, insisting that only technological safeguards can block last-minute fraudulent additions that cannot be detected or challenged once ballots have been cast.

According to Gogoi, the moment has come for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to explain to citizens why India still lacks machine-readable voting rolls, a gap he views as increasingly indefensible.

“Why is the Election Commission shying away from centrally available advanced software and continuing to depend on a manual process that is prone to large-scale abuse?” the Congress leader asked, questioning the ECI’s reluctance to adopt a system widely used across technologically advanced democracies.

Gogoi said the Congress is now demanding the urgent rollout of fully machine-readable electoral rolls for the forthcoming Assembly elections in Assam as well as all other poll-bound states.

He argued that a complete shift to digitisation, along with centralised software-driven preparation and verification of electoral rolls, is essential to eliminate errors and remove the scope for localised interference.

“There should also be a public disclosure of the technical reasons (if any) which is preventing the EC from adopting machine-readable formats used successfully by most modern democracies,” he added, seeking greater transparency over the Commission’s technology choices.

He further stressed the need for a strict audit trail documenting every addition, deletion or modification to the electoral rolls after the draft lists are published.

Protecting the integrity of the ballot, Gogoi said, remains the foremost responsibility of any constitutional authority.

“Reading the Preamble inside the Central Hall is meaningless if we cannot guarantee that every vote cast belongs to a genuine citizen. Machine-readable voter lists are not a choice — they are now a national necessity to save Indian democracy from systematic erosion’’, he added.

With PTI inputs