AP election officer rules out data theft

Chief Election Officer Gopala Krishna Dwivedi on Tuesday ruled out the theft of 3.5 crore voters' information from its servers by any entity as anyone can access and use the data which is in public domain.

Speaking with media in Amaravati on Tuesday, Dwivedi said that the Election Commission’s data of voters doesn’t include Aadhaar number or their link with their bank account. The ongoing investigation by the Telangana Police based on whistle-blower T Lokeswar Reddy’s complaint, however, says that the data confiscated from the IT Grids India Pvt Ltd does contain social details of all Andhra Pradesh voters.

“There are 45,000 booth-level officers in the state. There can be a few black sheeps here and there. Earlier there used to be one lakh applications a day for deletion of voters. However, the number has come down drastically these days,” Dwivedi said.

He made it clear that the commission has nothing to do with politics surrounding the data theft issue.

Meanwhile, the Andhra Pradesh Cabinet on Tuesday decided to counter the smear campaign unleashed by the TRS government in Telangana and the YSRCP.

According to them, the AP government resorted to data theft by transferring official data to private entities including IT Grids.

Silly politics: KTR

TRS working president K T Rama Rao criticised Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu for resorting to silly politics. He dared Naidu to face investigation rather than accusing the Telangana government of acting upon a complaint registered on its soil.

“The real question is how the government could give confidential data to a private company which developed an app for the Telugu Desam Party?” KTR asked.

In a related development, the Telangana police intensified their search for IT Grids Director Dakarvaram Ashok.

The Cyberabad Police, who are investigating the data theft case, has formed four teams to nab Ashok and has issued a notice to Amazon Web Services where the firm stored its data sets.