Beyond ‘cleaning’ voter rolls: The digital machinery behind SIR
The Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Indian government have consistently framed the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) as a routine and much-needed clean-up of India’s electoral rolls. In reality, however, it marks a deep shift. The push to use software systems to sanitise electoral rolls could be traced to the early 2000s with the explosion of the Information Technology industry. Despite the massive relevance of these systems in our democracy, the ECI has publicly disclosed very little about their algorithms and software architecture.The goal is no longer maintaining unique voters in…
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