**Congress to Issue Detailed Feedback on Bihar Voter List Amid Data Format Challenges**
NEW DELHI: Days after the Election Commission of India (EC) published the final voter list for the upcoming Bihar polls, the Congress party has announced that it will soon release a detailed feedback report. The task involves an arduous effort to download and analyze over 90,000 PDF files containing the voter list.
Praveen Chakravarty, Chairman of the AICC Data Analytics Department, informed this newspaper that the party’s data analytics team, along with EAGLE—the committee set up to monitor elections—has been rigorously working on the data.
“The final voter list is available only in PDF format, and unfortunately, these are scanned images rather than machine-readable digital text. The entire list runs into more than 90,000 pages. We have managed to download the PDFs, and the rest of the work remains,” Chakravarty said.
Opposition parties, including Congress, have criticized the Election Commission’s decision to replace the machine-readable draft voter lists with scanned image PDFs during this intensive revision exercise. Congress has been demanding access to the voter list in a machine-readable format, arguing that it would help identify and flag discrepancies more effectively.
However, citing a 2019 Supreme Court judgment, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar stated that the voter list in machine-readable format cannot be shared with political parties due to concerns that it could be edited and misused.
The final voter list shows a reduction of nearly 47 lakh electors, bringing the total number down to 7.42 crore from 7.89 crore after the special intensive review of electoral rolls.
In response, CPI (ML) General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said on Friday that the Opposition may approach the Supreme Court if the Election Commission fails to address the alleged discrepancies in the final voter list.
https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2025/Oct/04/partys-response-on-ec-final-voter-list-soon-chakravarty