SC to listen to plea on deletion of lakhs of names from voter lists in TS, AP

Express News Service

NEWDELHI : The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued discover in a plea difficult deletion of lakhs of names from the voter lists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. “An important issue which we have to decide,” a bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud stated.

The court docket’s order got here in a plea filed by a Hyderabad resident in opposition to the Telangana High Court dismissing his plea on April 21, 2022, ostensibly on the grounds that it was filed in 2018 and far water had flown down the Ganga.

It was argued that ECI’s impugned actions to ‘purify’ electoral rolls – utilizing an automatic course of from information acquired from Aadhaar and State governments and with out correct discover or consent from voters was a blatant infringement on the best to vote.  “Likewise, the ECI’s actions to permit electronic linkages between EPIC data, Aadhaar, and SRDH is an unconstitutional invasion of voter privacy and the right against voter profiling. Despite these glaring violations, the high court accepted the ECI’s counter affidavit without demur and dismissed the PIL,” the petition said.  Assailing the order, the plea stated that the excessive court docket failed to contemplate that ECI didn’t enact legitimate regulation, rule or regulation to make use of a software program or algorithm as an assist or substitute for verifying electoral rolls.

“The software source-code or algorithmic parameters for identifying duplicate, dead, or shifted voters remains undisclosed. Names were removed from electoral rolls without any explanation or electronic audit trail shared with affected voters; and a similar de-duplication exercise conducted previously in 2015 had a failure rate of 92% – wherein the software flagged 37,54,648 voters as duplicates, while only 2,47,789 voters (8%) were found to be duplicate voter entries after field verification,” the petition said.

Against this backdrop, the petition additionally said that the Election Commission of India abdicated its Constitutional obligation below Article 324 and in addition disadvantaged the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of voters of the 2 States.  “Egregiously, the ECI’s decision to create electronic linkages between voter ID and other government-owned databases has exposed voters to be profiled, targeted, and manipulated by entities with access to the data. ECI’s actions, therefore, threaten the sanctity and integrity of elections,” the plea said.

NEWDELHI : The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued discover in a plea difficult deletion of lakhs of names from the voter lists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. “An important issue which we have to decide,” a bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud stated.

The court docket’s order got here in a plea filed by a Hyderabad resident in opposition to the Telangana High Court dismissing his plea on April 21, 2022, ostensibly on the grounds that it was filed in 2018 and far water had flown down the Ganga.

It was argued that ECI’s impugned actions to ‘purify’ electoral rolls – utilizing an automatic course of from information acquired from Aadhaar and State governments and with out correct discover or consent from voters was a blatant infringement on the best to vote.  “Likewise, the ECI’s actions to permit electronic linkages between EPIC data, Aadhaar, and SRDH is an unconstitutional invasion of voter privacy and the right against voter profiling. Despite these glaring violations, the high court accepted the ECI’s counter affidavit without demur and dismissed the PIL,” the petition said.  Assailing the order, the plea stated that the excessive court docket failed to contemplate that ECI didn’t enact legitimate regulation, rule or regulation to make use of a software program or algorithm as an assist or substitute for verifying electoral rolls.

“The software source-code or algorithmic parameters for identifying duplicate, dead, or shifted voters remains undisclosed. Names were removed from electoral rolls without any explanation or electronic audit trail shared with affected voters; and a similar de-duplication exercise conducted previously in 2015 had a failure rate of 92% – wherein the software flagged 37,54,648 voters as duplicates, while only 2,47,789 voters (8%) were found to be duplicate voter entries after field verification,” the petition said.

Against this backdrop, the petition additionally said that the Election Commission of India abdicated its Constitutional obligation below Article 324 and in addition disadvantaged the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of voters of the 2 States.  “Egregiously, the ECI’s decision to create electronic linkages between voter ID and other government-owned databases has exposed voters to be profiled, targeted, and manipulated by entities with access to the data. ECI’s actions, therefore, threaten the sanctity and integrity of elections,” the plea said.