Shivam Vij

Indian election tourist since 2006. political consulting. former journo.

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

Anything that burns…

Anything that burns contributes to air pollution. We should support cleaner alternatives.

Replace coal grills and tandoors with electric ones.

Replace thermal power plants with solar panels everywhere.

Replace petrol and diesel with EVs.

[Live Law @LiveLawIndia]

Is ECI Correct In Saying Supreme Court Upheld Its New Form 6 Declaration? |@DebbyJain

Did the Supreme Court's May 2026 judgment in #BiharSIR case examine the present Form 6 Declaration?

#SupremeCourt #ElectionCommission #ECI

https://t.co/iXpaDs2Y6U

[Clifton D' Rozario @clifroz]

About 30 people have filed applications to delete the names of hundreds of voters, mostly Muslim, in Bhalki constituency. @thenewsminute found that voters there had no idea that someone wants their names deleted. They have lived there their whole lives.

https://t.co/MifzDr2H3D

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

At the heart of SIR controversy, ECI’s software for officers |

What we know about ERONET

ERONET processes enumeration forms and attempts to match a current elector with a corresponding entry in the base rolls

https://t.co/ulaumK1fau

[Snehasis @SnehasisMukhop4]

A long post!

The Election Commission never had the bandwidth or manpower to carry out such a gigantic clean up of the electoral rolls. It instead relied on an AI-powered application called ERONET.

It uses AI to identify Photo Similar Entries (PSE) and Demographic Similar Entries (DSE) to flag potential mismatches between current voter rolls and legacy databases, like the 2002 base rolls.

The software is essentially a black box, with little to no publicly available information about the AI models actually used in deployment. We do not know the model specs, similarity threshold used, its performance metrics, evaluation benchmarks, false positive rates, how it was trained or evaluated for Indian languages, whether it was developed indigenously or based on a known model/provider. We simply do not know enough.

Anyone with even a basic understanding of AI will tell you that these systems are prone to hallucination errors, and out of distribution (OOD) problems. Even the best large language models, vision models, state-of-the-art OCR technology in the market still struggle to peform with perfect accuracy, particularly on non-Latin scripts.

The 2002 electoral rolls were in native languages and scripts across different states, such as Kannada, Telugu and Bengali. Many AI systems continue to have substantially weaker performance on low-resource languages and scripts compared with English. For ex, a model trained on English will generalize poorly to a low resource language like Telegu or Odia. The old electoral rolls were not originally structured digital databases. They had to be digitised and processed, including through automated conversion into English in some workflows, before they could be compared against contemporary electoral data.

Effectively, it creates multiple points where errors can enter the pipeline through scanning, OCR, transliteration, and finally the AI based matching itself.

That means some level of rigorous human oversight is essential to keep such a system robust and control false positives. We do not know whether adequate human oversight was actually in place, or whether the entire workflow, from OCR and data extraction to AI based matching and automated notice generation, was effectively handed over to the system. The ECI needs to be completely transparent about how this entire workflow was carried out and make the relevant technical documentation, evaluation results, and human-verification procedures publicly available.

There is also a major question around the system's access control and privilege architecture. We do not publicly know the role-based access control (RBAC) structure of ERONET, who has read/write access to the underlying electoral databases, whether EROs or other field level officials can directly modify records, what privileges are available at each administrative level. The Indian Express report seems to indicate that EROs, who have the statutory authority to add/ delete voters, were denied this privilege through the software.

We also need to know whether there is a complete, immutable audit trail recording who accessed, modified, approved or deleted a record, when the action was performed, and what changes were made. Without this information, it is difficult to independently establish the chain of custody and accountability for changes made to electoral roll data.

[Krishan Partap Singh @RaisinaSeries]

Slapping a Gen-Z kid in front of a hundred cameras? Wow. Going to be a miracle if he keeps his job.

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

@indranil9 🤣

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

I filled my SIR form in Delhi diligently, going out of my room to give all information. my BLO said I had given much more than was required. I thought I would have cleared this SIR exam.

[Bol @Svaalbard]

Same thing happened to me. I submitted my own 2002 SIR verification and they insist it’s my father’s. Had a tough time convincing them. Even my father’s election ID wasn’t enough.

[Rants&Roasts @Sydusm]

SIR was allegedly done to send back Bangladeshis illegally staying in India.

For this, 13 crore names have been removed from voters' list.

Total population of Bangladesh is 18 crore.

[Rajesh Abraham🇮🇳 @pendown]

When Gyanesh Kumar was named accused in a suicide note. It's all coming out. #GyaneshKumar https://t.co/vESPozYIuA

[Kaushik Basu @kaushikcbasu]

26 Sept is the birthday of India's former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Excerpt from my @ProSyn article: "he insisted on the highest standard of honesty. When, in 2010, inflation was raging & some bureaucrats suggested that it might be best not to hurt his political standing by releasing so much price data, he put his foot down, insisting there should be no compromise on statistical transparency, even if it dented his poll numbers."
@ProSyn?referral=2da718 https://t.co/vMYfbdczdo

[Srinivas Kodali @digitaldutta]

A computer expert from IIT will determine if the ECI Net software is as per various laws and rules in India. Wondering if IIT profs are trained in laws these days to tell if software is constitutional.

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

@stfu_himanshu 🤣

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

@hafayaz If that’s the case then every single person should get SIR notice?

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

Poor overworked BLOs.

[Ashish Ranjan @Kranjanashish]

Point No. 1 of the @ECISVEEP press release is a significant victory for ordinary citizens: the BLO will visit the house of the person who has received the notice.
Thanks to @RitikaChopra__ @_YogendraYadav @AnjaliB_ @Saurabh_Unmute @suruchiarchives @reporters_co and many others.

[Vijaita Singh @vijaita]

The crowded SIR notice centres were perhaps bad optics, now BLOs asked to personally visit homes to collect documents from those served notices under SIR for “unmapping” and “logical discrepancies”. Most BLOs are school-teachers, waise padhai wadhai to hoti rahegi.

[Varghese K George @vargheseKgeorge]

This is a country which had an army chief/union minister who had two dates of birth on record.

That is just one example.

And it expects its poorest citizens to have records of their ancestry perfectly in place…

[The Wire @thewire_in]

Former Kerala Chief Secretary Says Gyanesh Kumar Tried to Persuade Him to Contest From BJP
https://t.co/JkgZ555CTN

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

I don’t see how that’s possible because both our voter ID cards have the right age. I have given the poor overworked BLO all the documents she asked for. I don’t understand why we are all being put through this harassment and why this system is so inefficient.

[Shivam Vij @DilliDurAst]

I didn’t get any notice. I messaged her auto abundant caution, and she said, of course you have been issued a notice. The “logical discrepancy” is that my age and my late father’s age in the 2002 SIR is the same for both — 18 years.