Election Rules amendment meant to protect privacy, prevent voter profiling: CEC
Conduct of Election Rules were amended in December to specifically prevent public access to CCTV footage from polling booths to protect the privacy of the voters and to prevent the footage from being used to train machine learning models, chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar said on Tuesday as he announced the polling schedule for the Delhi assembly elections. The December amendment, notified by the law ministry at the recommendation of the Election Commission of India, restricted default public access to election papers that were earlier accessible to the public. The amendment was made to “protect the privacy of the voter, to prevent the profiling of the voter”, he said. In December, transparency experts had said that the amendment means that all election papers, that are not mentioned in the CoE Rules or specifically listed by the ECI, cannot be made available to the public without a court order, allowing district election officers and other public authorities to deny access under different laws, including the Right to Information Act, experts said.
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