The Election Commission (EC) has implemented a new format for the draft voter list in preparation for the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections. The change involves replacing the digital machine-readable files with scanned images, which presents challenges in terms of searchability and significantly increases the file size, making them five times larger.
The EC published scanned images of the electoral rolls on its official websites on Saturday, replacing the digital draft voter lists. This action follows allegations made by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who accused the EC of withholding the digital voter list. Gandhi suggested that the digital list would reveal the presence of potentially fraudulent voters, allegedly benefiting the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The draft voter list for Bihar was unveiled on August 1 after the completion of the first phase of a special intensive revision conducted by the EC. This revision resulted in the removal of over 65 lakh voter names, attributed to factors like deceased voters, duplicate registrations, or permanent relocation.
The EC’s draft voter list for Bihar encompasses 90,712 voter lists, encompassing 7.2 crore voters. The list was initially made available on two separate websites on August 1. One, the Voter Service Portal, allows users to download voter lists from any part of the country in batches of 10.
The second website, Bihar SIR Draft Roll 2025, provides zip files organized by assembly constituency, each containing the individual voter lists for that specific constituency.
On August 6, the EC replaced the digital voter lists on the Voter Service Portal with scanned images. This scanned format is essentially an image of the voter list, lacking search functionality and posing considerable difficulties in data extraction. These image files are larger, have lower resolution, and demand more time for data retrieval, with an increased likelihood of errors.