States’ plea against SIR: EC entitled to protect privacy of voters’ list data, says Supreme Court

Justice Bagchi said this as Advocate Prashant Bhushan appearing for NGO Association for Democratic Rights (ADR), one of the petitioners, submitted the EC was refusing to provide the 2003 voters’ list in machine-readable form. He said giving the rolls in machine-readable format will not cause any prejudice. The counsel told the bench presided by Justice Surya Kant that machine readability of any list does not allow somebody to “manipulate” that list.

Justice Bagchi said, “Again, you are looking at that from an adversarial point of the data to the extent it affects the right of the person who is seeking to vote. Independent of that, the data itself is a valuable asset that the EC is holding in trust…”

Bhushan said those with large computer resources can even convert it into machine-readable format and asked why should the EC fight shy. Justice Bagchi said, “Mr Bhushan, you lock your house, still then the lock can be broken. Would that be a justification not to lock the house?” “The data is a valuable asset entrusted in the hands of EC. So EC is entitled to have layers of privacy on the data…”

To the submission that voters would otherwise have to go through the entire list to find their details, Justice Bagchi said, “What you may suggest, and this we are making a very generic suggestion even for the EC to consider that the individual may have a password to access the data. That is how the individual can verify his data on the encrypted database of EC, and thereby respond to the queries of EC in the course of SIR. It’s a question of debating on this and finding out the best possible solution. We want you to deliberate on it and give us your considered view.” The court also endorsed Bhushan’s suggestion that the EC should use deduplication software to weed out duplicate names. “That’s a good suggestion. There should be no problem with that,” said Justice Surya Kant while seeking the commission’s response to it.

Bhushan said the EC should be told it cannot determine the citizenship of voters through SIR, but Justice Kant said, “If they have power, they will determine. If not, they will not. This issue will arise in the final matter.” The bench issued notice on pleas challenging the SIR process in West Bengal, Puducherry and Tamil Nadu. The court will hear the matter on November 26. On a request by the EC, the SC asked High Courts to keep in abeyance petitions filed before them in respect of the SIR process as it is hearing the matter.

“Since this court is seized of the matter pertaining to legality of SIR of electoral rolls in various states, including Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, etc., we request jurisdictional High Courts to keep in abeyance/ defer the writ proceedings if any filed in those High Courts touching the validity of SIR in their states,” the bench ordered.

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