New Delhi,6 Jan 2026,: The untested software deployed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) without written instructions, protocols and manuals, red-flagged 1.31 crore voters in West Bengal and 2.35 crore voters in Madhya Pradesh as suspicious, putting their voting rights in jeopardy, says the latest report released by The Reporters’ Collective.
These voters earmarked as suspicious comprised a whopping 17.11% of the voting population in West Bengal and 41.22% of the voting population in Madhya Pradesh.
Crores of other voters were earmarked as suspicious across 10 other states that are undergoing voter reregistration as part of ECI’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), independent sources confirmed.
The ECI euphemistically termed these as cases with “logical discrepancies”.
The Reporters’ Collective accessed the suspect list summary of two states, which were drawn up in the first half of December. Data from these records are being made public for the first time. The ECI has kept such details for all 12 states undergoing the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls locked away from public scrutiny.
This software, used to identify voters as suspects, relied on the digitisation of physical voter lists from more than 20 years ago. The digitisation had been carried out across the 12 states in haste.
Detailed tests were not carried out in each state to verify the quality of this digitisation – whether computers could read these records and match them with voters’ inputs properly or not. This likely led to software misidentifying voters as suspicious, a senior ECI official in the state confirmed to The Reporters’ Collective.
ECI’s regulations require that whenever doubts are raised about a voter’s rights, these are resolved by a ground verification and a formal hearing by election officials at the constituency level. The ECI had not laid down in writing what evidence by voters would suffice to counter the computer-generated doubt about their rights.
Taken aback at the unprecedented scale of suspicious voters flagged by its software, the exercise to check the crores initially marked suspicious was abandoned across states, even as the SIR rolled on.
At least in one state, The Reporters’ Collective can confirm that the Commission kept repeatedly tweaking the software while the exercise was ongoing. This got the number of suspicious cases down with the passage of time. Meanwhile, it was left to the last-mile Booth-Level Officials (BLOs) and constituency-level election officials to work with discretion rather than any established protocol.
In West Bengal’s case, 1.31 crore voters were marked as doubtful on a list generated in mid-December. By January 2, this number had dropped to 95 lakh, The Hindu reported, citing sources in the state chief electoral officer’s office. However, no reports were released to explain how the 34 lakh cases marked suspect by the ECI’s software had been resolved.
This is the first recorded time that the ECI ended up raising doubts about the rights of crores of existing voters based on opaque algorithms, without the safety layer of ground verification and established protocols for resolving the doubts by officials.
The ECI has not made public any records, protocols, data or orders about this failed attempt to use an undocumented and untested software to test the voting rights of crores of voters at risk.
