One Vote Annual Conference

Data and databases can be considered a ‘community resource’. The job of the election commission is not just to conduct periodic elections, but also to keep it free and fair. If the secret ballot is no longer secret, or if people even feel it is not secret and safe, it is no longer free or fair. Importantly, when these institutions of state allow themselves to be hijacked for purposes other than that for which they have been set up - like the RGI did with the Census and the NPR - then they are not just going way beyond the statute that set them up; but they are morphing into something else. A 2012 policy on data sharing says that the data about people that any department holds becomes its `property’. This is appropriation of that which is not theirs. This is where the ECI is headed.