New Delhi: In a bid to enhance voter privacy and prevent the misuse of election-related data, the Election Commission of India (ECI) amended the Conduct of Election Rules in December, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Rajiv Kumar announced on Tuesday. The amendment specifically targets the use of CCTV footage from polling booths, restricting public access to such recordings to ensure voter privacy and to prevent the footage from being exploited for machine learning purposes.
The rule change, which was notified by the Law Ministry at the recommendation of the ECI, restricts access to the CCTV footage from polling booths, which was previously available to the public. “Only CCTV camera footage from the booth will not be given. It was prohibited earlier also,” Kumar stated. This decision comes in light of concerns over the potential misuse of footage for profiling voters and training machine learning algorithms.
Kumar further clarified that the amended rule, Rule 93(2), still allows access to 25 election-related forms. “All of them were available and will continue to be available,” he said, reassuring the public that transparency would remain intact while safeguarding voters’ privacy.
The primary motivation behind the amendment, according to Kumar, is to protect the identity and privacy of voters. He elaborated on the large volume of CCTV footage generated during elections, noting that with over 10.5 lakh booths across the country, each generating 10 hours of footage per booth, the total amount of recorded footage could span approximately 1 crore hours—equivalent to 3,600 years of footage.
Kumar highlighted the risks of this footage being misused for machine learning, which could result in the creation of artificial intelligence-generated content that could be weaponized to influence elections and spread disinformation on social media. “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 the public domain. How we vote, the machine will learn it,” Kumar said.
He also warned about the potential legal consequences if the footage were to be misused. “If we give the footage of even one constituency, that means about 1,800-1,900 constituencies. If someone tries to get that, it will take them 6.5 years to watch it. The tenure would have ended, and the limit for filing an election petition would have also lapsed. These footages are misused, and we could take criminal action, but we stop ourselves,” Kumar explained.
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