Why Has Election Commission Data Not Been Analyzed for Years? Why Are Universities Failing Us?

Date: 18-08-2025

For over 15 years, questions around the integrity of India’s elections have persisted — from mismatches between votes polled and votes counted, to the authenticity of voter rolls riddled with duplicates and ghost voters. Yet, despite such a critical issue, there has been little to no systematic, public analysis of Election Commission of India (ECI) data. Why? The answer lies not just in institutional opacity, but also in the failure of India’s universities to produce the kind of skilled professionals needed to take on this task.


The Data Problem: Locked Away in Non-Machine-Readable Formats

The ECI has consistently made electoral data available in formats that are deliberately unfriendly to analysis. Voter rolls are often published as scanned PDFs instead of structured, machine-readable files. This makes any meaningful cross-verification of votes — for instance, detecting duplicates across constituencies — extremely difficult without significant manual effort.

For over 15 years, no significant Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has successfully compelled the Election Commission to release data in a modern, analyzable format. Civil society organizations and independent researchers have raised concerns, but without structured access to the data, deep analysis remains impossible. The net effect: elections are shielded from the very scrutiny that ensures democracy’s credibility.


Where Are the Developers and Statisticians?

Even when imperfect data is available, India has no shortage of talent on paper — millions of engineering graduates and thousands of data science professionals. Yet, hardly anyone takes on election data analysis as a public mission. Instead, most graduates are caught in the grind of corporate jobs, working to serve the interests of global tech companies rather than contributing to democratic accountability.

This isn’t simply a matter of individual choice. It reflects a deeper failure of India’s higher education system to cultivate civic responsibility, statistical literacy, and applied research skills among its graduates.


The Incentive Gap: Why Students Don’t Build for the Public Good

Even when some students or young developers have the skills, they lack incentives to channel them into projects that serve the public interest. Building open-source tools for electoral analysis, environmental monitoring, or public health rarely earns recognition, funding, or career rewards.

Instead, students are trained to optimize for placements, multinational job offers, or short-term coding contests that prioritize speed over impact. The culture of innovation in Indian universities is thus skewed toward corporate employability rather than civic contribution.

Without scholarships, grants, or institutional support for public-good projects, talented individuals see little reason to spend their energy on analyzing election data — despite its critical role in safeguarding democracy.


A Democratic Deficit

The absence of skilled, socially-driven professionals in this space has real consequences. Without independent verification and analysis, elections become a black box controlled solely by the Election Commission — with no external audit of its processes. This erodes public trust in democracy.

Meanwhile, countries with stronger civic-tech cultures regularly produce open-source election analysis projects, watchdog platforms, and transparent datasets. India, despite being a global IT powerhouse, has failed to mobilize its vast technical workforce for something as fundamental as safeguarding elections.


An Appeal to the Web3 Community

The Web3 community in India itself is under siege. Through measures such as a 1% TDS on every crypto transaction, a flat 30% tax without loss-offset provisions, and increasing attempts to extend surveillance into bank accounts, trading records, and even emails, the government is building an architecture of financial control that erodes civil liberties.

Such overreach is only possible in an environment where governments do not fear electoral accountability. If elections are neither transparent nor fair, ruling authorities can impose punitive economic laws without worrying about democratic backlash.

This is where the Web3 community has a unique role to play. Beyond resisting unfair taxation and surveillance, it can act as a political tool to fund public good:

Supporting civic-tech initiatives that analyze elections and hold authorities accountable.

Funding independent civil society organizations and watchdogs.

Building decentralized platforms for transparency, data ownership, and free association.

For Web3 to live up to its ethos — decentralization, privacy, data sovereignty, and freedom from corporate or state monopolies — it must extend its struggle beyond crypto markets and into the defense of democracy itself. If governance collapses into unchecked centralization, even Web3’s promises cannot survive.


The Way Forward

Fixing this gap requires a two-pronged approach:

  1. Data Transparency: The Election Commission must be legally compelled to release all electoral data in machine-readable, standardized formats. A PIL demanding this is long overdue.

  2. University Reform: Higher education institutions must be reoriented away from rote learning toward project-based, civic-oriented skill-building. Engineering and statistics curricula should integrate real-world governance datasets, including election data, into coursework.

  3. Public-Good Incentives: Governments, universities, civil society and web3 community must create incentives — scholarships, grants, awards, and visibility — for students and developers who work on civic-tech projects. Until contributing to the public good becomes as rewarding as landing a corporate placement, the talent pipeline will continue to bypass critical democratic needs.

  4. Web3 Solidarity: India’s Web3 community must step forward, not just in defending its own interests, but in strengthening the democratic foundations that make decentralization meaningful. By working with and funding civil society, it can prevent the drift toward surveillance authoritarianism and keep government power accountable.


Until then, the mismatch between votes polled and counted, the existence of ghost voters, and the lack of independent scrutiny will remain festering wounds in India’s democracy — wounds that our universities, our Election Commission, and our silence have all helped create.