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The Election Commission has released a new format for the draft voter list ahead of the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections. Instead of the previous digital machine-readable files, image scan copies have been uploaded, which are more difficult to search and five times larger in size.
On Saturday, the Election Commission replaced digital draft electoral rolls with scanned images of the electoral rolls on its official websites. This move comes two days after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s allegations.
Rahul Gandhi had claimed that the Election Commission refused to provide the digital voter list because it could expose dubious and fake voters who allegedly help 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. More than 65 lakh voters’ names were removed, as these voters were either deceased, already registered, or permanently relocated.
According to the Election Commission, the Bihar draft voter list contains 90,712 voter lists, including the names of 7.2 crore voters. On August 1, the Election Commission uploaded the voter list on two different websites. One is the Voter Service Portal, which allows all users to download any voter list across the country in batches of 10.
The second website is the Bihar SIR Draft Roll 2025, which has zip files for each assembly constituency. Each zip file contains each voter list of that constituency.
On August 6, the Election Commission removed the digital voter list from the Voter Service Portal and replaced them with scanned images. The scanned format looks like a picture of the voter list. It cannot be searched and it is very difficult to extract data. These files are large in size, have low resolution, and take a lot of time to extract data and also have the possibility of errors.
