“Only CCTV camera footage from the booth will not be given. It was prohibited earlier also,” Kumar said.
The December amendment, notified by the law ministry at the recommendation of the Election Commission of India (ECI), restricted default public access to election papers that were earlier accessible to the public. HT had earlier reported that this amendment was to restrict access to CCTV footage.
Kumar clarified that through the amended rule, rule 93(2), allows access to 25 forms. “All of them were available and will continue to be available,” he said.
The amendment was made to “protect the privacy of the voter, to prevent the profiling of the voter”, he said.
“In 10.5 lakh booths, for our internal purposes, the CCTV recording begins in the morning. That’s at least 10 hours footage from each booth. …. That is then about 1 crore hours of footage. It will take someone 3,600 years to watch it. Why do they want to watch it? I will tell you why. It will be given for machine learning. All our faces, all our privacy, will be in public domain. … How we vote, the machine will learn it. The machine will create so much artificial intelligence generated content to spread on social media that fact finders will not be able to detect it,” he said.
“If we give the footage of even one constituency, that also means about 1800-1900 constituencies. If someone tries to get that, it will take them 6.5 years to watch it. The tenure would have ended, the limit for filing an election petition would have also lapsed. And these are misused. … we have examples of this footage being used. We could take criminal action but we stop ourselves,” Kumar said.
In December, transparency experts had said that the amendment means that all election papers, that are not mentioned in the CoE Rules or specifically listed by the ECI, cannot be made available to the public without a court order, allowing district election officers and other public authorities to deny access under different laws, including the Right to Information Act, experts said.
