Amendment to the election rules aimed at protecting privacy and preventing voter profiling: CEC | Latest news from India

Election rules were amended in December to prevent public access to CCTV footage from polling booths to protect voter privacy and prevent the footage from being used to train machine learning models, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said on Tuesday. announced the schedule for the Delhi Assembly elections.

“Only the recordings of video surveillance cameras from the stand will not be provided. It was also banned earlier,” Kumar said.

The December amendment, notified by the Justice Department on the recommendation of the Election Commission of India (ECI), limits public access by default to election documents that were previously available to the public. HT had earlier reported that the amendment aims to restrict access to CCTV footage.

Kumar clarified that the amended rule, rule 93(2), allows access to 25 forms. “They were all available and will continue to be available,” he said.

The amendment was introduced to “protect voter privacy to prevent voter profiling,” he said.

“In the 10.5 lakh booths, for our internal purposes, CCTV recording starts in the morning. That’s at least 10 hours of recording from each booth. … That’s about 1 crore hours of footage. It will take someone 3,600 years to watch. Why do they want to watch it? I will tell you why. It will be given to machine learning. All our faces, all our privacy will be out in the open. …The machine will learn how we vote. The machine will create so much AI-generated content to share on social media that fact-finders won’t be able to detect it,” he said.

“If we give personnel for at least one district, then it is also about 1,800-1,900 districts. If someone tries to get it, it will take them 6.5 years to watch. The term of office would expire, and the limit for submitting an election petition would also expire. And these are abused. … we have examples of how to use this video. We could have taken criminal action, but we are holding back,” Kumar said.

Transparency experts said in December that the amendment meant that all election documents not mentioned in Council of Europe rules or listed in the ECI could not be made available to the public without a court order, allowing county election commissions and other public bodies to authorities denied access under various laws, including the Right to Information Act, experts say.