About Bengaluru Votes

Why this app?

Bengaluru is heading into its first ward-level (GBA / corporator) elections in roughly a decade. Citizen interviews showed people are willing to vote but blocked by a few specific gaps: they don't know which ward they now belong to, they can't find trustworthy information about local candidates, and existing sources feel biased or unreliable. These gaps are widest for first-time voters — an unusually large group this election: after a decade without ward polls, nearly everyone under thirty, plus anyone who has moved to Bengaluru since, has never voted for a corporator.

The platform makes trustworthy, ward-level election information easy to find, compare, and act on — and gives citizens a voice in which local issues matter.

What does this app do?

This platform presents ward-level candidate information during GBA elections, along with useful and relevant civic information for Bengaluru. It allows users to:

Find their new GBA ward, by typed address or from their device's location.
Find their polling booth, using their voter ID (EPIC) number.
See the key issues in their ward, the questions worth asking any candidate, and vote on the top issues that matter to them.
Read neutral, sourced candidate report cards — track record, criminal cases, assets, education, party — and compare candidates side by side.
Handle the logistics: check registration, issue or update a voter ID, and learn how to vote — presented as an ordered checklist a first-time voter can follow end to end.
See their ward's result once it is declared.

Who is behind this initiative?

This app is an outcome of a joint partnership between Janaagraha and Oorvani Foundation, to advance citizen engagement in local decision-making, improve public understanding of urban issues, and promote accountability through accessible, real-time civic data systems.

The civic tech components of this partnership have been developed by Janaagraha, Oorvani Foundation and volunteers.

How is data sourced and verified?

Candidate information — criminal record, assets, education, ward track record — is drawn primarily from candidates' own sworn affidavits filed with the Election Commission, which are public record. Where affidavit data is extracted or summarised with AI assistance, it's marked as AI-extracted until a trained data curator has reviewed and confirmed it.

Affidavits have the following information:

Body type, district, taluk, ward/constituency number, voter roll part & serial no.; candidate name; father/husband name; age; residence
Voter roll enrolment details (part no., serial no.)
Phone, email, social media accounts (up to 3)
PAN + income tax filing status (candidate, spouse, dependents)
Pending criminal cases
Cases of conviction
Assets — movable and immovable, self / spouse / dependents
NEW (2026 amendment): declaration of disqualification under any statutory or local authority order — (a) Act & case under which disqualified, (b) authority that issued it, (c) case number, (d) date of disqualification order
Liabilities
Educational qualification

Ref: Order SECK/ULB/OTHR/1/2026-ULB dated 22/04/2026, e-Gazette Part III, No. 324

Every field you see on a candidate's page carries a visible source — so you can always tell whether something comes from an official affidavit or from curator-compiled context, and where to find the original document. Curators are trusted volunteers with local knowledge, scoped to specific wards or a zone; their edits go live immediately.

If you spot something wrong, you can flag it from any candidate page — flagging is open to everyone, in any ward, no account needed to raise a flag, though we ask you to sign in before it's submitted so we can follow up if we need more detail.

Much of Bengaluru's open civic data resides in the Karnataka Geographic Information System (KGIS), the state's public spatial-data platform run by the Karnataka State Remote Sensing Applications Centre (KSRSAC). This app uses the following datasets:

TBD

Our neutrality stance

We are not affiliated with any candidate, party, or government body. This platform exists to give Bengaluru citizens neutral, sourced, ward-level information ahead of the GBA Ward Elections.

We don't endorse or oppose any candidate, party, or position. Candidates are presented side by side, with the same fields and the same sourcing standard applied to everyone. Ward issues are defined by local curators from resident input, not by us, and issue-voting results are shown to everyone, not just the people who voted.

What do you do with my data?

In short: we don't sell it, and we don't hand it to anyone except the handful of service providers that keep the platform running — under contract, on our behalf, never for their own purposes. Contact details you give us (email or phone) are used for two things only: election updates for your registered ward, and critical, service-affecting product notices. They are never used to market anything else, and never sold. The full breakdown of what's collected, who processes it, and your rights over it lives on our privacy policy.