One Vote Annual Conference

The issue of deletion of names from the voters list is not new for. Before almost every election, it is found that the names of lakhs of voters are deleted by the Election Commission who then claim that this exercise was done as there were duplicate or multiple voters, and it is only these who have been removed.

But the problem is bigger, and more nuanced which the Election Commission has failed to address for years. Besides deletion of names from voters list, it is found that there are common errors which are yet to be addressed i.e.,entering incorrect names, age, address and missing or wrong photo which has been uploaded in the Election Commission’s EPIC database.

We have found that authorities delete names of voters randomly, and likely on account of pressure from higher officials who perhaps have to show that they have reduced the number of voters in a particular constituency or ward. This happens largely without following any due procedure or without set parameters in undertaking such exercise.

Rather, there is evidence that they identify duplicate or multiple voters in a particular area by doing a field enquiry by embarking on door to door check/verification of the voters list, so that the duplicate voters/names can be identified and deleted.

The problem here arises with the Election Commission failing to conduct a door to door verification to identify the duplicate voters, and instead whimsically using different technological solutions to weed out duplicate voters.

A ‘voter purification’ exercise was done in 2018 in Telangana as part of purification of voters list by linking Aadhaar with EPIC. DUring this process around 20 lakh names from the list of voters’ in the electoral roll were deleted.

People from across the state who had been voting at the same polling booths for years were shocked to see that their names had been omitted from the voters list, without any prior notice as they couldn’t find their names in the list when they went to cast their vote. Likewise, thousands of voters’ names were deleted on different occasions by the authorities without following due process of law.

After this huge disastrous system based de-duplication or purification process of removing names of voters, The Telangana State Election Commision and Telangana State Technological Services began to test and use facial recognition technology for voter verification in the local body election in Kompally in 2020. This is a larger problem.

While the rationale behind the move, according to authorities, and per news reports, was to reduce cases of impersonation, the larger issue that remains is what will be done with the photographs which have been taken. Where will they be stored and how will they be used? While the government maintains, per news reports, that the photographs will not be used for any other purpose save the ones as specified, a threat looms in the absence of any data protection law. What is more worrying is that the Data Protection Bill, in its current form, could do more harm than good, especially vis-a-vis the citizenry’s rights to privacy. The bill, as articulated by members of parliament overseeing the bill, have pointed out that several, blanket exemptions have been given to government and security agencies. This could deliver not just a body blow, but bring about a complete decimation of this very right.