Abstract

Electoral rolls constitute a foundational yet largely invisible infrastructure of democratic governance. Prior research on digital democracy has focused on electronic voting machines and online voting, but the mechanisms and processes through which voter eligibility is enacted, contested and stabilized remain understudied. Drawing from sociomateriality and street-level bureaucracy, this paper examines India’s recent electoral roll revision to analyze how eligibility is produced and performed through the complex interactions between digital applications, documentation regimes and voter verification process.  We use an interpretive research approach to analyze publicly available documents, government guidelines, news reports, editorials and videos that capture formal procedures, citizen experiences, civil society opinions and the work of Booth Level Officers (BLOs) as frontline actors. Our findings show that while electoral roll revision is projected as a record-updating exercise to ensure accuracy, it is an enactment in which routines, digital platforms and field-level interactions between multiple actors collectively and actively transform voters’ eligibility. The performativity of technology becomes visible in voters’ interactions with their BLOs where they (re-)negotiate their political and national identity. Cycles of contestation and temporary stabilization of voter eligibility emerge while legitimacy is performed as distributed sociomaterial work by BLOs as temporary street-level bureaucrats. Viewing electoral roll revision as an infrastructural and performative process, this study extends Information Systems research on public digital infrastructures and digital democratic governance.

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