Editorial: ECI process needs a through audit

A technical audit of the code written for ECINET, the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) internet portal, has found that it had a provision to selectively block Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs (AEROs) in West Bengal from accessing voters’ enumeration forms and the notices-and-hearings dashboard.

The enumeration forms contain details of voters and the notices-and-hearings dashboard is an online interface to manage the notices issued to voters and the submissions received from them as part of the verification of electoral rolls.

The audit was done by Charchagram, an independent civic technology initiative that studies the digital systems used by public agencies for transparency and accountability. It found two points of concern in the software code governing the ECINET portal.

One was that the system allows access to voter-enumeration forms to be switched on or off state by state. This allows exclusion of EROs and AEROs from accessing voter-enumeration forms and the notices-and-hearings dashboard. It included a specific provision for West Bengal. Secondly, the system allows officials to mark certain voters as VIPs.

While the audit did not establish whether these access features were actually used during the special intensive revision (SIR) process in Bengal, it lends weight to last month’s reports in the Indian Express newspaper that the voter database was centralised in New Delhi, and EROs and AEROs in the states were shut out of access to the voter deletion and inclusion function. Election Commission members Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi raised several red flags over this bypass and the centralisation of operational control in the hands of ECI’s director-general for IT, Seema Khanna.

In the context of nationwide concerns regarding the SIR process in general and the conduct of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar in particular, these findings of the Charchagram audit raise several questions, which the commission must answer formally and directly.

First, it needs to be established who authorised these selective restrictions which made an exception for Bengal. Why did the code designers feel it necessary to include an option to leave local officials of one state out of the loop? The next question to nail down is whether these restrictions were enforced. If so, the commission must reveal the logs showing when access was disabled, for whom, and upon whose instructions. What was the response of the commission in New Delhi when local officers reported difficulty in accessing the system for their mandated work?

The commission must also come clean on the purpose of VIP tagging and how that feature was administered. Who qualifies as a VIP, who can assign that status, and what safeguards were there to prevent preferential treatment for some voters? The Supreme Court, which is hearing petitions challenging various aspects of the SIR process, must examine whether it is constitutionally proper to treat some states and some voters differently from others.

The ECI has so far failed to squarely address the question why the voter name deletion function was kept out of reach of EROs. Now it must also disclose the full extent of the use of access control features in the SIR exercise, explaining why this information was not disclosed to political parties. If indeed it is established that there was arbitrary use of these functions, it calls into question the SIR exercise in total.