NEW DELHI: Days after the Election Commission of India (EC) published the final voter list in poll-bound Bihar, Congress said that it will soon issue a detailed feedback as it involves an arduous effort to download over 90,000 PDFs of the list.
Praveen Chakravarty, chairman, AICC Data Analytics Department told this newspaper that the party will issue its response this week as its data analytics department and EAGLE, the committee set up to monitor polls, have been rigorously working on the data.
“It involves rigorous effort as the final voter list is available in PDF format for download, but it is provided as scanned images instead of machine-readable digital text. It runs into more than 90,000 pages. We have downloaded the PDFs and the rest of the work needs to be done,” he said.
The opposition parties, including Congress, were up in arms over the ECI’s decision to replace the machine-readable draft voter lists with scanned image PDFs for the intensive revision exercise. The Congress has been demanding the voter list in machine-readable format, saying it will help it flag flaws. However, citing a 2019 Supreme Court judgment, CEC Gyanesh Kumar said that the voter list in machine-readable format cannot be shared with political parties as it can be edited and can lead to its misuse, he said.
In the final voter list, the total number of electors have come down by nearly 47 lakh to 7.42 crore from 7.89 crore before the special intensive review of electoral rolls.
Oppn may move SC
CPI (ML) general secy Dipankar Bhattacharya said on Friday that the Opposition would move the SC if the EC failed to address alleged discrepancies in the final voter list.