New Delhi, Jan 7 (IANS): There has been an instance of polling CCTV footage being misused, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said on Tuesday stressing the need to protect the privacy of voters and justifying the decision to deny public access to polling footage.
“The curbs on public access to footage are aimed at protecting the privacy of voters and check any form of profiling,” he said, adding that those seeking footage are apparently doing so for training Machine Learning models and using AI to float fake theories.
Justifying the curbs on access to footage, CEC Kumar said, in perhaps the first official confirmation, that polling footage has been misused recently.
“If we start sharing the footage, then the parties will be able to know who voted and who did not or with whom the voter went to the polling booth and at what time,” he said, adding that such footage was not being shared even before the Conduct of Election Rules were amended in December to specifically prevent public access to CCTV footage.
After releasing the election schedule for the Delhi Assembly elections, CEC Kumar clarified that the newly introduced rule to deny footage of CCTVs outside and inside a polling booth will in no way reduce the transparency of elections.
“Every other detail or information related to an election that was available till December 2024 will be available through the 25 plus 4 forms that are permitted under Rule 93,” he said.
Flanked by Election Commissioners S.S. Sandhu and Gyanesh Kumar, the CEC repeatedly highlighted the impartiality of elections in India by using remarks like “Disclosure is our forte”, “India is a gold standard of election” and “There is no scope for conspiracy”.
CEC Kumar hit out at attempts to spread rumours about the recent tweak in rules for sharing polling CCTV footage. “I want to know why would one need such bulky data?”
Imagine someone seeking CCTV footage from 10.5 lakh booths, spanning 10 hours each and adding up to a total of 1 crore hours of footage.
“If an applicant starts scanning this bulky data it will take 3,600 years to see the entire footage,” he said, raising doubts over attempts to create an impression that the CEC was not keen to share the footage as it wanted to hide something.