'It's An Important Issue': Supreme Court Issues Notice On Plea Alleging "Voter Profiling" By Election Commission

Kodali had earlier approached the Telangana High Court which dismissed his PIL.

It is his case that ECI has permitted state governments to access and make copies of voter records. "ECI has effectively created a surveillance...sensitive information voters including religion, caste, tribe, ethnicity, language, records of entitlement, income, and medical history is now linked to voter information". This will allow political actors to segment people into 'interest groups' and either selectively target or ignore them from electoral process, thereby interfering with free and fair conduct of election, he says.

All this was done in the absence of any valid law to use algorithm as an aid or substitute for verifying electoral rolls, he adds.

Advocate Gautam Bhatia appeared for Petitioner.

"In sum, the ECI abdicated its constitutional duty under Article 324 and statutory obligation under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 D to prepare electoral rolls without the aid or assistance from the government or electronic databases under their control," the plea filed through Advocate N. Sai Vinod says.

He avers that the names of a large number of voters in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have been deleted by the software.

"Names were removed from electoral rolls without any explanation… voting rights of millions of voters in two states were deprived without due process," plea says.

It adds, "right to vote encompasses the right to not have an excessive administrative burden that impedes or deprives the right to vote. In failing to inform the affected voter, and without specifying the reasons for deletion, the ECI unlawfully placed the burden on voters to prove that they are neither duplicate nor shifted nor a dead voter."

ECI had claimed before the High Court that the alleged software is a database maintained system for "purification" of electoral rolls. "It does not delete voters on its own and there is no algorithm in the software which can be used as intelligence for taking a decision by itself...EROs are empowered under Section 22 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and under Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 to carry out deletions and corrections of names from/in the electoral rolls."

Kodali claimed that ECI failed to justify that the burden this move casts on privacy rights, is proportionate to their stated goals.

The High Court had dismissed the plea stating that if any individual is aggrieved by deletion of his name from the voter list, he does have a remedy to submit a proper application for inclusion of his name in the voter list. it added that even an online mechanism is available for inclusion of name in the voter list.