Uploaded Bihar draft rolls format under lens
The change came to light on Saturday, nine days after it was first published on August 1, following the conclusion of the first phase of the controversial special intensive revision in Bihar last month.
When the draft rolls were uploaded on August 1, the files were searchable, text-based PDFs of around 1 MB each (of a single booth in an assembly constituency) with an apparently higher resolution. The version currently on ECI's website consists of scanned images that cannot be searched via text, are about 7 MB each, and appear to have lower resolution.
The new format of scanned files generally requires optical character recognition (OCR), which is a more tedious and error-prone way of extracting the text from a PDF file.
The change affects both the Voter Services Portal — which allows downloads of voter lists across states in batches of 10 — and a dedicated 'Bihar SIR Draft Roll 2025' site on the Bihar CEO website that hosts assembly constituency-wise zip files. Both now contain scanned images in place of the earlier machine-readable format.
Asked about the change, ECI officials said, 'As far as we know these were always scanned images and no change has been made.'
HT ascertained the change because it was able to extract the summary table from the draft rolls of 59 ACs on August 1 without using OCR. The non-OCR programmes -- run by HT in two different programming languages; R and Python -- did not work for at least two booths from two different ACs out of the 59 on August 9. HT could not perform the check for all ACs because the changed files are also much larger in size, which is usually the case with image files compared to document-based files.
According to ECI's Manual on Electoral Rolls (2023), draft rolls are to be made available on the Chief Electoral Officer's website 'in an Image PDF format' but also 'in a text mode' without photographs — instead indicating whether a photograph is available or not.
The development comes in the middle of a public dispute between ECI and the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, over alleged manipulation of electoral rolls.
Gandhi on Thursday had alleged that there were 100,250 'stolen' votes in the Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bangalore (Central) parliamentary constituency that helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win the seat in 2024, accusing ECI of 'colluding' with the ruling party.
He also demanded access to electronic voter roll data from the past 10 to 15 years, along with CCTV footage from election offices. Gandhi had said Congress took 6 months to identify such discrepancies as ECI refused to share a machine readable format for the voter roll.
His presentation prompted an immediate reaction from ECI, which asked him to send a signed declaration and oath to the effect. ECI officials have since publicly urged Gandhi to either sign the oath or 'apologise' to the nation.
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