The Election Commission of India (ECI) issued a directive on Thursday (October 15) for another revision of electoral rolls, as protests against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process continue.The directive said the electoral rolls of 17 states and Union Territories (UTs), including the poll-bound states of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Manipur, will be revised through a Special Summary Revision (SSR). The SSR process involves periodic updates, adding newly eligible electors and deleting those who have passed away or shifted. It differs from the SIR process in that the names of existing electors automatically enter the new rolls and they need not offer additional documents.The Congress party on Friday highlighted a portion of the directive that spoke of supplying all recognised political parties with copies of draft and final rolls in a readable PDF format. “Rahul Gandhi ji had been consistently demanding a Machine readable digital voter list, so that the tampering happening in the voter list could be caught,” an official social media post said. It added that the ECI was “absolutely unwilling”, but now has had to “concede defeat”.Also Read | Rahul Gandhi wanted to know who skipped protests. Then came the callsWhat does machine-readable mean in this context?Converting written text into a digital format would earlier involve manual data entry. This painstaking process was supplanted by a technology called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It allows machines to detect letters through pattern recognition, achieved by feeding in vast amounts of data.In this case, making voter lists machine-readable makes it easier to search for voters’ names and details.The ECI directive said that the “ERO (Electoral Registration Officer), immediately after draft and final publication… shall supply free of cost two copies (one hard copy & one soft copy in readable PDF format) of each separate polling station of the roll to every recognised political party.”This, it added, was in accordance with Rule 11(c) & 22 (c) of the Registration of Electors Rules of 1960. The former says that after the creation of the draft, the ERO shall “supply free of cost two copies of each separate part of the roll to every political party 1 [for which a symbol has been exclusively reserved in the State] by the Election Commission.” Rule 22 (c) mandates the same upon the final publication of the roll.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Delhi Confidential | At Rahul Gandhi’s high tea, MPs had one question: Where are the samosas from?And why does it matter?The Congress has repeatedly demanded making lists machine-readable in recent years.Currently, the rolls are available as “image PDFs”, where photos of the rolls are scanned and uploaded. It is unclear whether the new ECI directive that mentions “readable PDF” marks a change.Last August, Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, addressed a press conference alleging fake voter names were added to the voter list in the Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency.Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera wrote in The Indian Express, “The only way to audit the electoral rolls of the entire country is to automate the process… We would need digital/machine-readable electoral rolls of all the constituencies. Then, an unbiased, apolitical computer programme can analyse the electoral rolls — constituency after constituency — to produce an indisputable report card on their accuracy.”Story continues below this ad“Consequently, our team, which was earlier determined to analyse the electoral rolls of multiple constituencies, was forced to sift through the electoral rolls of just one assembly segment in one Lok Sabha seat because it had to be done manually, a process that took six months and thousands of man-hours,” he added.Also Read | ‘Gyanesh Kumar must turn approver’: Rahul Gandhi on Express investigationBack in 2018, Congress leader and former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath, and Congress leader Sachin Pilot, took these and other procedural issues concerning elections to the Supreme Court.As The Indian Express reported then, Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan rejected the petitions, saying the bench was “of the opinion that the format in which the draft electoral roll is supplied to the petitioner fulfils the requirement contained in the Election Manual”. Nath had cited clause 11.2.2.2 of Chapter XI of the Election Manual, 2016, in support of their demand for a text version of the draft electoral rolls.The clause that deals with “putting draft roll on website” says, “additionally, the draft roll shall be put in public domain, at Chief Electoral Officer’s website, in a PDF format on the same day. The draft roll shall be put on website in a text mode and no photographs would appear against the elector’s details. Instead, it would indicate in the box meant for the photograph of elector whether the photograph is available or not”.Story continues below this adThe ECI stated that it had put out the voter list on its website in text mode and even images on the website were in text mode and that it had taken a “conscious decision not to give copies of these voter list to the political parties in scannable text mode keeping in view the issue of privacy of voters”.After examining the rules, the court concluded, “The clause nowhere says that the draft electoral roll has to be put up on the Chief Electoral Officer’s website in a ‘searchable PDF’. Therefore, the petitioner cannot claim, as a right, that the draft electoral roll should be placed on the website in a ‘searchable mode’. It has only to be in ‘text mode’ and it is so provided”.Also Read | Amid stir against election chief, protester thrashed, stones thrown at bus of detaineesThe court said that if the petitioner wanted, “he can always convert it into searchable mode which, of course, would require him to put his own efforts”.In 2025, the SC again considered the issue when the NGO Association for Democratic Rights (ADR), among other petitioners, challenged the validity of the ongoing SIR process. The petitioners said that the EC was refusing to provide the 2003 voters’ list in machine-readable form. Notably, the last SIR exercise was held from 2002 to 2004.Story continues below this adAgain, the court raised concerns about data mining and privacy. “It prejudices per se, a data available at large, for mining by irrespective of the individual, any agency. And to that extent,” it raises “issues of individual privacy, issues of collective protection of data of Indian citizens. This is not adversarial. It has polycentric impact,” said Justice Joymalya Bagchi. In its May 2026 verdict, the court upheld the SIR exercise.