Chief Election Commissioner Highlights Concerns Over Polling Footage Misuse
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New Delhi, Jan 7 (NationPress) There has been an incident involving the misuse of polling CCTV footage, stated Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Tuesday. He emphasized the necessity to safeguard the privacy of voters and supported the decision to restrict public access to this footage.
“The restrictions on public access to footage are designed to protect the privacy of voters and to prevent any form of profiling,” he noted, adding that those requesting footage appear to do so for training Machine Learning models and utilizing AI to propagate misleading theories.
In what may be the first official acknowledgment, CEC Kumar justified the limitations on access to footage by stating that there has indeed been recent misuse of polling footage.
“If we begin sharing this footage, political parties would be able to ascertain who voted, who did not, or with whom a voter visited the polling booth, and at what time,” he explained. He further mentioned that such footage was not made public even prior to the amendments to the Conduct of Election Rules in December, which specifically barred public access to CCTV footage.
Following the announcement of the election schedule for the Delhi Assembly elections, CEC Kumar clarified that the newly established regulation denying access to CCTV footage in and around polling booths will not diminish the transparency of the electoral process.
“Every other detail or information related to an election that was available until December 2024 will be accessible through the 25 plus 4 forms permitted under Rule 93,” he stated.
Accompanied by Election Commissioners S.S. Sandhu and Gyanesh Kumar, the CEC repeatedly underscored the impartiality of elections in India, using phrases like “Disclosure is our forte,” “India is a gold standard of elections,” and “There is no room for conspiracy.”
CEC Kumar criticized the circulating rumors regarding the recent changes in rules pertaining to the sharing of polling CCTV footage. “I am curious as to why someone would require such extensive data?”
Consider the scenario where one seeks CCTV footage from 10.5 lakh booths, each covering 10 hours, totaling approximately 1 crore hours of footage.
“If an applicant begins analyzing this massive data set, it would take 3,600 years to review all the footage,” he remarked, casting doubt on the motivations behind attempts to portray the CEC as unwilling to share footage to conceal something.
