The Election Commission (EC) has altered the format of the draft voter list for the upcoming 2025 Bihar Assembly elections. The EC has moved from digital, machine-readable files to scanned images, a change that has implications for data accessibility and file size.
The EC’s decision, announced on a Saturday, involved replacing the digital draft voter lists with scanned images on its official websites. This decision followed accusations from Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who claimed that the EC was reluctant to release the digital voter list. Gandhi suggested this was because the digital list could expose irregularities and potentially fraudulent voters who may be aiding the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The draft voter list for Bihar was published on August 1, following the completion of the initial phase of the EC’s special intensive revision process. This revision led to the removal of over 65 lakh voter names, attributed to factors such as death, duplicate entries, or permanent relocation.
The EC’s draft voter list for Bihar includes 90,712 voter lists, covering a total of 7.2 crore voters. The voter list was initially available on two different websites on August 1. One is the Voter Service Portal, which allows any user to download any voter list across the country in batches of 10.
The second website, Bihar SIR Draft Roll 2025, features zip files for each assembly constituency. Each zip file contains the voter lists specific to each constituency.
On August 6, the EC replaced digital voter lists on the Voter Service Portal with scanned images. This shift to scanned images presents limitations: the images are not searchable and make data extraction more difficult. Furthermore, these image files are larger, have lower resolution, and take more time to process, with a higher potential for errors.