Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : West Bengal’s electoral rolls are public, but not ‘public’ enough and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
“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.