High Court seeks response from Election Commission of India to PIL on deletion of voters’ names

The High Court has heard petition and has asked ECI to file counter arguments.
Election Commission of India (File | PTI)
Election Commission of India (File | PTI)

HYDERABAD: A city-based independent security researcher filed a petition before the High Court questioning the transparency of an algorithm used by the Election Commission of India which, the petitioner alleged, led to the deletion of 22 lakh names from the electoral rolls in the State. 

The High Court has heard petition and has asked ECI to file counter arguments. The petitioner, Srinivas Kodali in his PIL sought greater transparency in preparation of voter lists, an exercise which “seems to have been delegated to a software tool contrary to the procedure established by law”. 
The petitioner claimed that the software tool was identifying false positives and false negatives and deleting names without adhering to the law. 

The PIL cited the example of Bihar, where the software was used to detect duplicates by State’s Election Commission. “It was found that the software had identified almost 37,54,648 voters from amongst the draft publication of electoral voter rolls with reference to January 1, 2015, as possible duplicated. However, after all the possible duplicates were verified by the field officers only about 2,47,789 voters were deleted.” 

It claimed that since the failure rate of the software was almost 93 per cent, EROs should follow the safeguards put by the ECI before deleting any voter from the voter rolls. The petition alleged that the EROs were deleting names identified on the software suo motu. A letter attached to the PIL, showed how Bihar Election Commission noted that after the field verification when the software was run again, it again identified duplicates in clean rolls. 

The petition also said Telangana and Andhra CEO for saying that deletions happened as many voters shifted their base from Telangana to Andhra after the bifurcation of the State. 

“However, if that were to be the case then there ought to have been an increase of voters in one of the either two States. However, the number of voters has decreased in both the States leading to the belief that the deletion were in fact those of (alleged) duplicate voter identified by the software, which the ERO’s have deleted without following the procedure established,” it said. 

Taking cognisance of the petition, the HC has asked ECI to file counter arguments and set next hearing for December 27.

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