As India prepares for its next general elections, AI has moved from a theoretical concern to an immediate reality. Deepfake videos of political leaders already circulate during state elections, while AI-powered tools enhance voter registration verification. With 970 million eligible voters, the world’s largest democracy faces a challenge: Harness AI’s transformative potential while guarding against its capacity for manipulation.

India’s electoral rolls contain nearly a billion entries, with approximately 80 million additions, deletions, and corrections processed annually. Machine learning could transform this mammoth task. Traditional name-matching algorithms struggle with the linguistic diversity — where “Mohammad” appears in 15 spellings, or “Kumar” surfaces across millions. AI models trained on Indian name patterns can identify potential duplicates even when spellings vary wildly or transliterations differ between Hindi and English. During Bihar’s 2024 Special Intensive Revision, manual verification took weeks; AI could reduce this to days while flagging anomalies like multiple registrations from single addresses.

Computer vision can detect when identical photographs appear in multiple voter ID applications under different names — a common fraud technique. AI can optimise booth management across the roughly 1,500 polling stations in each parliamentary constituency. AI analysis of historical turnout patterns, demographic clustering, and geographic accessibility could balance loads months in advance. Campaign finance transparency offers another frontier. AI can cross-reference declared expenses against market rates, flagging when candidates claim to have spent Rs 50,000 on rallies that clearly cost Rs 5 lakh. Computer vision analysing rally footage can estimate crowd sizes and infrastructure costs independently, catching discrepancies before campaigns end.

However, there is a flip side. Convincing deepfakes can be........

© Indian Express