NEW DELHI: Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Tuesday justified the recent amendment in election rules to restrict CCTV footage of polling booths from public inspection, saying that it was necessary to maintain voters’ privacy and prevent any misuse of the footage to spread fake narratives by applying machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Sources said the EC’s concerns stemmed from the fact that Mehmood Pracha, the petitioner who had moved the Punjab and Haryana High Court to get CCTV footage pertaining to conduct of assembly elections in Haryana last year, had earlier secured CCTV footage relating to an election in UP. “He edited it and posted select clips on social media to create a fake narrative about a certain community’s participation in polling,” disclosed a senior EC official.
EC had, in its submissions before the court, objected to sharing the CCTV footage from Haryana with Pracha, who had contested the last Lok Sabha polls as an Independent candidate from Rampur. It submitted that Pracha was neither a candidate nor a voter in Haryana. The high court had, nevertheless, directed EC to share the CCTV footage. The change in Conduct of Election Rules ensured that it wasn’t shared ultimately with Pracha.
Kumar on Tuesday said that while other documents allowed under Rule 93 of Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, will continue to be available for public scrutiny, the CCTV footage was specifically excluded as it reveals a lot of data about the voters, including their faces that can expose their identity and who they have come with for voting. It will also reveal data of those who did not vote.
The CEC said the rules were amended “to protect the privacy of the voters as well as their profiling”.
Wondering how CCTV footage from a polling station can be useful to a party or candidate, CEC said given that it relates to 10 hours of polling at 10.5 lakh polling stations, “it will take a person 3,600 years to scan it if watched for eight hours daily”.
He said even fact checkers would not be able to find out whether the AI-generated videos of polling stations are fake or genuine.
Kumar said there were other documents like Form 17A, which records the manner in which polling proceeded in a polling station, that have not been available for public scrutiny right from the beginning. Form 17A has a record of the identity documents produced by the voter prior to voting, as well as the voters’ signature or thumb impression.
