West Bengal’s electoral rolls are public, but not ‘public’ enough

“The Election Commission of India maintains electoral data in a structured, machine-readable format within its ERONET system. It, however, restricts what is made publicly available — to the public, to researchers, and even to political parties. In effect, the concern is not about whether the data can be structured; it already is. The concern is about who gets to use it in that form,” AltNews reported on Thursday evening, once again raising questions about opacity in the functioning of the Election Commission of India (ECI).

The report explains that “…the rolls were uploaded not as searchable, machine-readable files, but as scanned PDF images — effectively photographs of printed pages. They cannot be searched. They cannot be meaningfully analysed. Every page resists scrutiny by design, which, in a moment of intense political contestation, raises a central question: who benefits when public data is made practically unusable?”

Another concern, not explicitly articulated in the report, is what safeguards exist to ensure that machine-readable data are not selectively shared with particular political parties or agencies, such as the BJP.

AltNews said it broke through these barriers only after putting in enormous hours of work. It identified three key obstacles that had to be overcome before the electoral rolls of the two constituencies could be analysed:

Access barrier: Bhabanipur alone contains 267 zones. The ECI website allows downloads for only 10 areas at a time, each protected by a CAPTCHA, effectively blocking automation. Manual downloading took hours.

Format barrier: The scanned PDFs are, on average, 228 times larger than digitally readable equivalents, yet contain none of the underlying structured data. This is not a technological limitation. India already runs large-scale digital systems such as Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker. Publishing a CSV (a computer file using comma-separated values) alongside a PDF would be trivial by comparison. The absence of such formats is therefore a deliberate decision.

Content barrier: Roughly one in 10 voter entries carries a diagonal “UNDER ADJUDICATION” watermark, often obscuring the voter’s name. This is not incidental. It directly interferes with automated data extraction and, in some cases, even manual reading.

“Each layer targets a different stage of scrutiny: CAPTCHA blocks collection, image format blocks analysis, watermark blocks identification,” the report adds. It notes that the Election Commission already possesses this data in structured form, as the PDFs themselves are generated from databases. Publishing only scanned images, without accompanying machine-readable files, is therefore a choice that withholds usability, not information.

The Election Commission spent public money building ERONET — the centralised system that flagged over a crore “logical discrepancies” in West Bengal, while declining to publicly explain how those flags were generated. In a democracy, data that is technically public must also be practically accessible. “When it is not, the barrier is not technological, it is political,” the report states.

The report also recalls earlier justifications offered by the ECI for restricting electoral rolls to image-based formats. “In January 2018, it directed all state chief electoral officers to publish rolls as image files, citing data security concerns, specifically the risk of misuse by foreign actors. When this policy was challenged in court by Congress leader Kamal Nath, the Commission argued that searchable, machine-readable formats would enable large-scale data mining and potentially violate voter privacy. The Supreme Court of India declined to examine this claim on its merits, leaving the choice of format to the Commission’s discretion.”

More recently, in August 2025, chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar said machine-readable files are effectively “barred” because they “can be edited”, opening the door to misuse. This argument has been widely criticised as technically unsound. Editing a downloaded dataset does not and cannot alter the original records maintained by the Commission. The integrity of the official rolls is not dependent on the format in which they are publicly shared.