When parties toy with voters' privacy

There was a time when political parties went door to door to share voter slips, but today they want to use technology. Recently, many of them started sending out voter slips containing booths and voter identity card (ID) numbers in Bengaluru through WhatsApp directly to voters, making people feel concerned about how the political parties knew which mobile number was linked to which voter ID.

On April 28, voters in Malleswaram were perplexed to receive a message on WhatsApp that included excerpts of their voter ID sent from the BJP MLA’s office. When questioned by voters and media, the office staff said they used the data from complaint registers but did not explain how those numbers were linked to voter IDs.

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This happened in the Bommanahalli Assembly constituency as well. Says Vivek Ravindranath, a resident of HSR Layout: “I was stunned to receive my wife’s voter ID number and booth details on WhatsApp on my mobile number. The message also asked me to support the candidate from Aam Aadmi Party.” However, he did not file a complaint.

The trend is a part of the larger issue of voter databases being used by political parties for various purposes. On April 28, upon receiving a complaint of calls from a party that had caste-specific inputs, election officials raided a call centre in Mallattahalli in Bengaluru. They found that the company had a database of caste-wise classification of voters. The investigation is on.

A few months ago, an entity named Chilume Trust, tasked with voter verification by the BBMP, was found collecting Aadhaar and voter preferences from people, in violation of the Election Commission guidelines. The series of such events related to data collection has increased the concerns of privacy activists.

“Door-to-door distribution of paper voter slips is common practice during elections but when people receive it on WhatsApp, not many understand it as a violation of privacy,” says Vinay Kumar, a pro-democracy activist based in Basaveshwaranagar.

“Although privacy has been recognised as a fundamental right under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India through the Justice Puttaswamy judgement of 2017, it remains an elitist concept for most Indians,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the collection of mobile numbers by political parties continues. A volunteer who was issuing ‘guarantee cards’ (promises made ahead of elections) door to door on behalf of the Indian National Congress (INC), was also found asking for mobile numbers. He clarified that they do not collect voter ID details.

Fight for public voter rolls

Voter rolls are public, and they need to be public in order to help the public scrutinise them, says P G Bhat, an activist who worked for the cleansing of electoral rolls. However, the linking of phone numbers is a big problem, he concurs.

In 2012, P G Bhat and other activists found that about 13.5 lakh voters were deleted from Bengaluru’s voter list. They were able to figure this out because voter rolls were public, extractable and analysable. As a result of a court battle, in December 2012 the Election Commission of India (ECI) had to restore the deletions.

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Later, the state election commission published the revised electoral roll in January 2013 with a captcha control. The Portable Document Format (pdf) files still had copyable text so Bhat downloaded them, analysed them and gave a report asking them to fix many other issues.

“Seeing that we were able to download it, they changed it to scanned images in 2013,” he says. This made it difficult to copy the file contents. After he approached the ECI, the then Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka Anil Kumar Jha, in a meeting in Delhi, said he did it for the sake of data security. “EC directed him to take appropriate action,” says Bhat.

After more follow-up, the voter roll was changed to copyable pdf files. From 2013 to 2017, rolls were published as normal text pdf files.

In 2017, the pdfs became scanned image files with captcha control again. And in January 2018, ECI mandated image-scanned files with captcha control as the standard for electoral rolls.

The rolls have remained so since then. Though they are public, nobody can access them, unless they sit and type each entry. Matching phone numbers to it is more work for sure.

Sale of voter data

How, then, do the parties get the data with phone numbers, voter IDs and constituencies?

On April 26, digital news portal The News Minute published an investigative report on the selling of voter details and phone numbers on a website, which allegedly called the candidates in order to market the data. One such candidate approached the Election Commission with a complaint. An FIR has been registered and the website selling the data has been taken down.

The story says: According to sources in the Election Commission, what is of concern is that the format of the data on sale is similar to the data stored on ERONET, a government portal with ECI data on voters that only election officials can access.

This, when electoral rolls are in the public domain as non-copyable image files, mirrors the ambiguity the government has in its privacy policy.

“The selling of voter data has been happening since 2011. Whatever data available with the Election Commission was available on sale, including mobile numbers,” says Bhat.

“That was a time when phone numbers were not being recorded by ECI. Recording of phone numbers started subsequently. If the data from ECI is taken now, the phone numbers will be available,” he explains.

“People who sell phone numbers can be collecting numbers from other sources too. PDF files are public officially, and if someone wants they can type out the whole data again. It’s not a secret,” he adds. The current privacy laws do not make it illegal to collect and share such data, he argues.

“We should go to the root cause. Legally speaking, even today if someone is leaking the data there is nothing illegal about it. It is illegal only if ECI leaks it,” he says.

“I don’t like what is happening. But there is no ground to say what is illegal. There is no way to publicly scrutinise voter lists if they are not public. Without this, we could not have known about the illegal deletion of 13.5 lakh voters,” he says.

“If the breach has taken place from the government records, the government needs to be a lot more cautious and ensure greater protection of the data which is under its control,” says Sandeep Shastri, political analyst and national coordinator of Lokniti Network.

Privacy breaches a major issue

Voters across Bengaluru and elsewhere are complaining of many automated and manual calls that ask for voter preferences and opinions on various issues. While the trends show a lack of respect for the voters’ privacy by various entities, many people who were targeted by such parties remain unperturbed.

Shastri says that any voter outreach through mobiles is a privacy breach. “Voter lists are public with information about name, age, gender, address etc. However, there are groups that are able to get more details like mobile numbers and are sending targeted messages. This is a clear breach of voters’ privacy,” he explains.

“The question is how did they get mobile numbers. They say it was through the contacts people made with politicians. This is also a breach of privacy. A citizen gets in touch with you to resolve a problem and shares the mobile numbers or voter ID out of faith. If it is used to influence the voter, it is a strong breach of the faith the citizen had in going to public representatives and complaining. That is also a clear violation of privacy,” he says.

Referring to the Chilume Trust case, he says nobody knows for which purpose the data was used. “This gives an unfair advantage to a person contesting the election,” he adds.

Thejesh G N, a digital safety activist who founded DataMeet, says that attaching voter slips to phone numbers and WhatsApp can make micro-targeting of voters easy. Because such data will also have the location, gender, religion and other data attached to it. It can easily be used for profiling the voter too, along with voting preferences.

“Micro-targeting is risky for several reasons. It can be used for misinformation, manipulation and engineering emotions. These undermine the democratic process and contribute to polarisation. It also creates tiny echo chambers that push preexisting beliefs, which makes discussions and building consensus on key issues difficult,” he adds.

FIRs being registered

We are booking cases wherever we are finding model code of conduct violations. One such case is already under investigation by the cybercrime branch. One more FIR has been registered. The source of the voter data breach is also under investigation.

- Manoj Kumar Meena, Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka

To file complaints against violation of model code of conduct and direct voter outreach on phone:
1) Call 1950 and report.
2) Download CVigil app and report violations