On October 15, 2026, the Election Commission of India (ECI) quietly issued an order that electoral rolls will be provided to political parties in searchable format for the Special Summary Revision (SSR) now under way in 17 states and Union Territories. Parties will also get separate lists of additions, deletions and corrections, and a weekly list of claims and objections.In plain words, the commission has conceded a demand it resisted for eight years. It called that demand a risk to privacy. It called it an invitation to manipulation. The Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) called it “prohibited by the Supreme Court”. If the rolls can be shared in readable form today, a simple question follows. Why could they not be shared in 2018, in 2024, in 2025 or during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR)?Let’s recall that the Congress party has repeatedly demanded machine readable electoral rolls, after it suspected that a large scale, organised vote chori was executed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to illegitimately win elections.Rahul Gandhi raised the demand in the parliament, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge wrote to the CEC, Congress delegations repeatedly met the ECI. But the demand was met with denial,ridicule and even derision.The suspicion on the sanctity of free and fair elections was not without basis. Maharashtra and Haryana election results shocked the Congress and the public alike. The sentiment on the ground wasn’t translated into the verdict. Earlier, a similar confusion was experienced in Madhya Pradesh as well.Gandhi wanted a scientific, clinical analysis of the doubts. It required machine readable electoral rolls. The ECI refused to provide it. Where it beganAhead of the Madhya Pradesh asssembly election in 2018, Congress examined the voter lists of 101 constituencies. It found about 27 lakh suspect entries. The same names, fathers’ names and addresses appeared in more than one place. Projected across the state, the figure came to about 60 lakh.Congress raised it with the ECI, which sent teams to four constituencies and called the complaint incorrect. Later, it quietly deleted about 24 lakh names from the same rolls and insisted that the deletions had nothing to do with the Congress complaint. Congress went on to win the elections with a slender overall vote difference of 47,927 votes. Imagine the results, if 24 lakh bogus votes weren’t deleted prior to polling.ECI insisted that the deletion was its own routine exercise. Congress leader Kamal Nath asked the obvious question: If the complaint was baseless, why were 24 lakh names struck off?The Congress could do this analysis for one reason. In those days, the rolls came as simple text PDFs. A computer could read, sort and match each entry against another.Precisely when such analysis was initiated by the Congress, the ECI decided to close that door. On January 4, 2018, the commission told its field officers to release only image PDFs, which are photographs of pages. A computer could not convert it to text anymore.The case in Supreme CourtCongress realised that a black box was being created by the ECI. A black box of voter data, that no one other than the ECI itself could open and use. So congress went to the Supreme Court. The then president of Madhya Pradesh Congress, Kamal Nath filed a writ petition in August 2018. Rajasthan Congress president Sachin Pilot filed a similar one for Rajasthan. The petitions, along with other issues, asked for text-format electoral rolls.ECI accepted that large scale incidence of bogus voters was a fact but opposed the petition on privacy grounds.On October 12, 2018, a bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan dismissed the petition. The court held that the Election Manual required rolls in “text mode”, not in a searchable text format, and that the choice of format lay with the commission.Then it added a line that matters more than the rest. If the petitioner wanted, the court said, he could always convert the roll into searchable mode, though it would need his own effort. The court refused to create a right. It did not create a ban. It just passed on the burden to the voters. It assumed that conversion would remain possible.For seven years, the commission used this judgment as a wall. On August 17, 2025, CEC Gyanesh Kumar said machine-readable rolls were prohibited and dated the court’s view to 2019. This was a wrong presentation of the judgment. Nowhere had the court prohibited a machine-readable format. In fact, it presumed the petitioner could convert the rolls himself. What the commission had done since was to make conversion impossible.Harder files, harder questionsBy 2025, the issue of electoral rolls came under critical study. In February that year, Rahul Gandhi, Supriya Sule and Sanjay Raut demanded the consolidated rolls of Maharashtra’s 2024 elections. The lists now came as flattened PDFs, coded so that disaggregated data could not be pulled out for analysis. In 2018, we could extract the data. In 2025, we could not.The cost of that change became visible on August 7, 2025. Gandhi presented the Congress analysis of Mahadevapura, a single assembly segment of Bangalore Central. The party found 1,00,250 suspect entries. It took a team of about 40 people six months to examine one seat, working through stacks of paper. An audit that software could finish this in hours took half a year.The ECI did not respond with data. Kumar held a press conference to ridicule the Leader of Opposition and publicly challenged him to either file an affidavit or apologise. “There is no third option,” Kumar thundered.It is sad and ironic that the CEC didn’t realise that there always was a third option. It was the voice of ‘We, the People of India’.Gandhi didn’t apologise, he didn’t submit the affidavit. He arduously and consistently reached out to the people of India, gave them evidence of vote chori, explained to them what was happening and led them on the streets of Bihar and Delhi.The same ECI that refused to upload a searchable list of the 65 lakh names dropped in Bihar, that didn’t provide searchable lists till recent state elections, has now felt the heat and taken a U-turn.The October 15 order is a real gain. Readable rolls, change lists and weekly claims lists were exactly what the opposition sought. The order also exposes the emptiness of the original argument. The privacy concern has not vanished. The Supreme Court judgment has not changed. The only thing that has changed is the pressure.But a readable PDF is not yet an open database. The new copies will carry no photographs, and the Haryana analysis showed that duplicate photographs are among the clearest signs of fraud. The order covers a summary revision. It does not reopen the SIR rolls on which several states have already voted. Change lists are useful only if they carry dates, the form used and the officer who approved each entry. And the algorithms that flag and delete voters remain closed to scrutiny. The ECINet server remains centralised architecture shutting out EROs, who are statutorily mandated to maintain electoral rolls.Therefore the following must be extracted from the ECI:Machine Readable electoral rolls must carry photographs too, else the analysis that Rahul Gandhi presented in case of Bangalore, would still not be possible.Publish change logs. Every addition, deletion and correction should be released with the date, the form used and the authorising officer, as Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge asked in June 2025.Publish deletion lists in searchable form by default, as the Supreme Court ordered for Bihar in August 2025, for every revision in every state.Seal each release digitally with checksums so that any altered copy can be exposed at once.Open the algorithms. The rules used for de-duplication and ‘logical discrepancy’ flags should be published and independently audited. Set a last date for revision of electoral rolls after the notification of polling dates and share copies of Supplementary List and Additional Supplementary Lists of Electoral Rolls with political parties.Protect the statutory officer. Restore full ERONET access to EROs, and bring control of the central database under a written, Commission-approved protocol, as two Election Commissioners have demanded.It’s worth recalling that non-machine readable electoral votes were introduced when Congress analysed and identified lakhs of bogus voters in Madhya Pradesh in 2018. The SIR was introduced when Congress discovered illegal and unauthorised addition and deletion of voters in Maharastra and Haryana.And now U-turns by the ECI have started when people of India have begun to resist. In the past couple of weeks, ECI has capitulated on several counts. The revised Form 6 has been withdrawn. BLOs have now been instructed to visit homes of deleted voters, instead of asking the voters to travel to present their case and a special drive has been initiated for the excluded voters. It is now more clear than ever that resistance is the key.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.Gurdeep Singh Sappal is Permanent Invitee, Congress Working Committee.