Interim plea on use of software for cleansing voters’ list dismissed

Petitioner claimed software used by EC was not transparent

Hyderabad, Telangana, 29-01-2019: The new signage of Telangana High Court, in Hyderabad on January 29, 2019. Photo: K.V.S. Giri / The Hindu

The Telangana High Court on Monday dismissed an interim plea of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) petition to declare as illegal the usage of a software by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to prepare and maintain electoral rolls.

A Division Bench comprising Justice V. Ramasubramanian and Justice P. Keshava Rao declined to pass any direction on the petitioner’s request to reveal the source code of the software and algorithms used with it.

The other pleas of the interim application to provide the Data Audit Log of the date and the time relating to deletion of voters and direction for a forensic audit of the software were also dismissed.

An engineering graduate from Indian Institute of Technology-Chennai, K. Srinivas, had filed the PIL petition arguing that the duty of preparation and maintenance of electoral rolls assigned to the ECI through the Constitution and the Representation of People’s Act cannot be executed by adopting a software. Petitioner’s counsel B. Arjun Reddy contended that the software adopted by the ECI was neither transparent nor public.

Mass deletions

Hence, it would result in mass deletion of voters from the list, he submitted to the court.

Apart from these main contentions, the petitioner sought an interim order to declare usage of the software, describing it as non-transparent, illegal.

The Bench, in its order, observed that the prayer in interim application No. three of the PIL petition was contradictory to the ‘very plank on which the main writ petition was founded’.

The Bench said the petitioner had described sharing of information by the States with the Union amounted to infringement of the Right to Privacy.

“...We do not know how the petitioner can seek a direction to the State governments of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to provide the data attributes of information which was allegedly shared by them with the ECI and the State Election Commissions of Andhdra Pradesh and Telangana...”, the Bench noted in the order.

There were no averments in the affidavits in support of the petitioner’s claims about the two States sharing information with the ECI and the SECs, the order said. However, the Bench made it clear that the question about the deletion of Aadhar data and the process to be adopted for it can be examined at the time of final disposal of the PIL petition.