Tag Archives: polls

Much ado about data privacy of voters list

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Operation Twins

The CPI (M) has accused Opposition Leader Ramesh Chennithala of leaking data on voters and publishing them on a server located in Singapore. However, the accusation does not hold water in the face off facts.

Mr. Chennithala had published data on 4.34 lakh persons in the voters’ lists for the upcoming Kerala Assembly Elections, whose photos appear under different names in the same constituency or other constituencies or whose names appear more than once in the lists, on the site operationtwins.com. Voters’ lists are data in the public domain, so no leak has taken place.

Voters list is not sensitive data under the IT Act and Rules unlike health information which is defined as sensitive (recall the controversy over Springler).   Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011 also has a proviso to Section 3 that says that “any information that is freely available or accessible in public domain or furnished under the Right to Information Act, 2005, or any other law for the time being in force  shall  not  be  regarded  as  sensitive  personal  data  or  information  for  the  purposes  of  these rules”.

It is true that the Web server is located in Singapore. However, that does not alter the legal position. Voters list is data officially published under the law and accessible in public domain.

The only thing that you can accuse the Opposition Leader is that there are some errors in his list of bogus voters. Besides, he was not honest enough to include some duplicate entries of Congress candidates and their relatives in the list. Possibly because of limitations of photo matching, the names of twins have been flagged as duplicate entries, with operation twins thus causing some heartburn to real twins. While a chunk of data point to fraud, other duplicate entries could be the result of failure of the officials to delete previous entries when voter requests change of address or corrections.  It is clear that sufficient diligence had not been shown by electoral officers.

Mr. Chennithala has chosen to register a domain with commercial extension for the site and keeping the registrant information private. He could have chosen extensions (top level domains) like .in or .org.in. But it is a matter that hinge on availability/personal choice/ignorance. The person who registered the site probably did not register the site in the name of Mr. Chennithala and wanted to keep his name private.

It may also be noted that the accusations against Mr. Chennithala comes when there is demand for publishing of more data relating to electoral process internationally by organisations like the Open Election Data Initiative. So, Mr. Chennithala’s initiative is setting up a site to expose electoral malpractices is laudatory.

In fact, Mr. Chennithala has been raising a number of allegations against the LDF government. If even a fraction of them are correct, that do not bode well for the State. If the LDF is re-elected to power, the government would be at the mercy of Central agencies. This can give rise to deals between the CPI (M) and the BJP or even instability of the government.

However, this may not be a problem for Chief Minister Pinarai Vijayan to manage for he has already taken a few leaves from Modi’s note book to retain power and pelf.

Duplicate entries in voters list is a massive fraud

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Lakhs of duplicate names and fake entries in the voters list for Legislative Assembly elections in Kerala is a massive fraud on the people of the State.

The initial estimates are that the number of duplicate entries, which can be used for voting by impersonation, is above four lakhs. There is also the allegation that migrant workers had been enlisted without following procedure and checking their status properly.

It is surprising that the electoral officers had not cared to check for duplicate entries at least in the same constituency not to speak of duplicate entries across constituencies. This is when computer technologies these days make it easy to find duplicate entries, though Malayalam script and variations may make it a little difficult than in English.

The existence of large number of duplicate entries came to public knowledge when Opposition Leader Ramesh Chennithala raised the issue and accused the ruling front of complicity. Apparently, he had been assisted by someone skilled in analysis and comparing of large chunks of data.

It is not surprising that the things have come to such a pass, given the lackadaisical manner in which the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Kerala, handled data. This had not started in recent years. As back as in the nineties, total votes polled and the sum of the votes polled by individual candidates did not tally in certain cases. In one of the election reportage, published by the ECI, the numbers did not tally in more than 25 constituencies. Though this was brought to the notice of the CEO, he did not correct them and they still remain as the official tally. By 1996, computers came into use in compiling data and the figures. Data, which could not be validated, were artificially tallied by adjusting invalid and uncounted votes.

In the 2016 Assembly elections, some data in the Constituency data summary, officially released by the Election Commission (especially that of electors and votes polled), do not match with the detailed results published by ECI. There were also variations with detailed results published on the Web at the time of announcement of results.

The CEO’s Office has been reluctant to release computer-processable data, which can be used for data validation, despite an order by the State Information Commission under the RTI Act. (The accompanying image shows the operative part of the order of the Commission dated May 29 last year which is yet to be complied with). These were symptoms of deeper malady.

Despite all the improvement of communication facilities, the CEO office often has not been able to come out with correct percentage of polling on the polling day itself. The number of electors supplied before and after polling often varied as last minute enrollments and deletions were not either properly updated or were plainly incorrect.

Now, it is going to be an uphill task for the election officials to delete lakhs of duplicate and fake entries and furnish the count. There is also the issue of bogus or multiple electoral identity cards issued in the name of the same person.  It is not going to be easy to find them and destroy them.  This raises the prospect of miscarriage of the electoral verdict.

Though the irregularities could not have happened to this scale without the connivance of officials, a proper inquiry is yet to be conducted. So far action had been taken against only one official though many need to be removed from playing any role in the elections. Meanwhile Mr. Chennithala has approached the High Court seeking action.

SIC order
Operative part of the SIC order on RTI request for election data.

Elections Declared: Whom to Vote

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EVM
Voters of Kerala, which goes to Assembly polls on April 6 , will have to be very diligent in casting their votes. (The same goes for other States too).
Otherwise, your suffrage would be undermined by your elected representative choosing to change sides. The political climate in the country is such that it is not easy to predict who would be changing their loyalties and when. Here is an advisory.

Do not vote for the candidates who are liable to be blackmailed because of their involvement in crime or corrupt practices. Avoid voting for greedy politicians. If your candidate has wealth beyond his known sources of income, never vote for him or her. (They are in politics for amassment of wealth and they will change the side the moment they get a good offer.)

Avoid voting for candidates of small parties which are prone to change sides. There are a few exceptions  in this regard like CPI and CMP which has not switched sides for  decades (four and two and half decades respectively).  Most have changed sides or split with groups migrating from one front to another. New parties such as the Twenty-twenty are to be judged by the caliber and integrity of the candidates they are putting up.  If it is a retired civil servant, check whether they had faced allegations of corruption. If it is a media person or businessman, evaluate his or her professional conduct. If they had been honest, fair and ethical, they may not change sides.

BJP State president K.  Surendran has stated that BJP will rule Kerala if 30 to 40 of its candidates are elected. This is to be taken seriously because seven State governments have been brought down by the BJP in the last seven years by engineering defections. Actually, the party will not need even that many members to gain a share in power in Kerala. 

It is notable that the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, Kerala, is yet to State the reasons for malfunctioning of electronic voting machines during last Lok Sabha  polls despite an order from the State Information Commission to release the information under RTI Act.

Keep an eye on the legislators and the voting machines too. Ensure that your verdict is not miscarried.

“Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.” Sam Shepard

Kerala Assembly elections: Congress needs a paradigm shift

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It will be an uphill task for Congress in Kerala to win the Assembly elections this year. The party will have to reinvent and meet new challenges.

Congressmen will have to forget its group squabbles and seat sharing and come up with a new array of candidates who could win the elections. It is also time for a generation shift.

The Congress has taken a big risk by alienating Kerala Congress (M) so that it could try to dominate in the UDF strong-hold of Kottayam— a long-standing dream of Congress men from the district such as the Kottayam MLA, Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan. They thought that the death of Kerala Congress leader K. M. Mani gave them the opportunity. However, erosion of votes seen in the panchayat elections even in former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy’s constituency (Puthuppally) showed that the dream is a difficult one to realise, though Mr. Chandy and Mr. Radhakrishnan will be able to hold their fort. In the strongholds of Ernakulam district, the emergence of Twenty Twenty as a political party is throwing up a new challenge.

These would force the Congress to pay special attention to districts which are not their strongholds and cut losses in districts such as Pathanamthitta. In this scheme of things, Thiruvananthapuram district becomes one where the party has to fight some important battles especially against the BJP.

It has been suggested that top Congress leaders like Oommen Chandy and Ramesh Chennithala should contest from Thiruvananthapuram to wrest the Nemom seat from the BJP and the Vattiyoorkavu seat from the CPI (M). However, the leaders were not willing to move out of their pocket boroughs.  Obviously, they could fail in Thiruvananthapuram if BJP and CPI (M) come to a tactical understanding behind the scenes. Many are already concluding that the BJP is forcing Chief Minister Pinarai Vijayan for some adjustment, as a quid pro quo against Central agencies going slow on the probes on involvement of the Chief Minister’s Office and some Ministers and Speaker P. Sreeramakrishnan in gold smuggling and other scams. Now, the party is trying to persuade V. M. Sudheeran to contest from Vattiyoorkavu while the strategies for other constituencies are not yet clear.

The party has members of Parliament Rajmohan Unnithan and K. Sudhakaran to hold the fort in Kasaragod and Kannur districts respectively. But K. Muraleedharan, MP, has stated that he would campaign only in his constituency (Vadakara), pointing to ongoing infighting in the party.

Though the honesty and suave manners of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is no match for the divisive politics of Narendra Modi at the national level, the presence of the Wayanad MP can cast a spell in Kerala.  But this has to be matched with selection of inspiring young leaders to win strong-holds of the CPI (M). Names such as that of AICC spokesperson Shama Mohamed has come up in this regard. Congress will also have to think of fielding winnable candidates from outside the party also as the stock of the khadi-wielding politicians with no worthwhile job of their own (other than politics) is fast diminishing. But the scramble for seats among party men has always prevented Congress from scouting for talents outside.

Yet, the party is showing some signs of mending. It is drawing up a well-studied manifesto under the leadership of Shashi Tharoor and other qualified persons.  However, barring Mr. Tharoor, the social media presence of Congress and its outreach to the young are still poor compared to BJP and the CPI (M). Though Congress men are active here and there solo, there is no coordinated action to project policies or political views. In fact, many leaders are found wanting or afraid to take on BJP and even the CPI (M).  This is why it is important for the party have a new generation of leaders with no baggage from the past to carry.