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

NEWDELHI : The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued notice in a plea challenging 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 said.

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

It was argued that ECI’s impugned actions to ‘purify’ electoral rolls – using an automated process from data received from Aadhaar and State governments and without proper notice or consent from voters was a blatant infringement on the right 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 stated.  Assailing the order, the plea said that the high court failed to consider that ECI did not enact valid law, rule or regulation to use a software or algorithm as an aid 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 stated.

Against this backdrop, the petition also stated that the Election Commission of India abdicated its Constitutional duty under Article 324 and also deprived the voting rights of millions of voters of the two 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 stated.