The Election Commission has updated the format of the draft voter list in preparation for the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections. The move involves replacing digital, machine-readable files with scanned images, which presents challenges regarding search functionality and significantly increases file size.
The Election Commission made this change on Saturday, replacing digital draft electoral rolls with scanned images on its official websites. This follows allegations by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who claimed the Election Commission was withholding the digital voter list. Gandhi asserted that the digital list might expose dubious and fake voters allegedly helping the Bharatiya Janata Party win elections.
The Bihar draft voter list was released on August 1 after completing the first phase of the Election Commission’s special intensive revision, which resulted in the removal of over 65 lakh voters’ names. The removal was due to factors like deceased voters, duplication, or permanent relocation.
The Election Commission’s draft voter list for Bihar comprises 90,712 voter lists containing the names of 7.2 crore voters. The lists were uploaded on two websites on August 1. The Voter Service Portal allows any user to download voter lists from 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 the respective constituency.
On August 6, the Election Commission replaced digital voter lists on the Voter Service Portal with scanned images. This scanned format is essentially an image of the voter list, making it non-searchable and difficult to extract data. These image files are also larger, have lower resolution, require more time to process, and are more prone to errors.