Guwahati, Nov 27 (PTI) Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) chief Gaurav Gogoi on Thursday urged the Election Commission (EC) to immediately implement machine-readable electoral rolls in all forthcoming assembly elections, starting with Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Puducherry.
“India is the world’s IT superpower, yet our voter lists are prepared manually by booth-level officers and this outdated system has become the biggest gateway for large-scale manipulation and insertion of fake voters”, Gogoi told reporters in Jorhat.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly demanded machine-readable voter lists because only technology can stop last-minute fraudulent inclusions that are impossible to detect or prove once voting is over, he said.
It is time that the Chief Election Commissioner tells the public why India still does not have machine-readable voter lists, he asserted.
”Why is the Election Commission shying away from centrally available advanced software and continuing to depend on a manual process that is prone to large-scale abuse?”, the Congress leader asked.
Gogoi said his party demands the immediate rollout of fully machine-readable electoral rolls for the upcoming assembly elections in Assam and all other states going to the polls.
There should also be complete digitisation and centralised software-based preparation and verification of voter lists to eliminate manual interference, the deputy leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha said.
“There should also be a public disclosure of the technical reasons (if any) which is preventing the EC from adopting machine-readable formats used successfully by most modern democracies,” he added.
A strict audit trail for every addition, deletion or modification in the electoral rolls after the draft publication stage should also be conducted, he added.
Protecting the integrity of the vote is the first duty of any constitutional authority, Gogoi asserted.
“Reading the Preamble inside the Central Hall is meaningless if we cannot guarantee that every vote cast belongs to a genuine citizen. Machine-readable voter lists are not a choice — they are now a national necessity to save Indian democracy from systematic erosion”, he added. PTI DG DG MNB
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