SIR: Digital rights researchers demand more transparency for audit of ERONET by civil society

There is a need to open up the electoral roll management (ERONET) software to find what is hindering people’s acceptance in the voters’ list after Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, said digital rights researchers at a webinar on Friday.

Speaking at a webinar organised by Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) on ‘Equal Vote, Unequal Process: SIR and Questions on the role of ECI’, Srinivas Kodali, independent digital rights researcher, said: “I think they made Aadhaar mandatory, kind of, in SIR, they keep saying it is not mandatory, because of the requirements under the Supreme Court judgment. They officially can’t tell you it is mandatory. But unofficially, it is mandatory. What you are doing is, whatever the law might say, the software system is not aligned with the law, or with the court’s judgement. And this is the problem with the backbox governance we are looking at.”

He stated that the only way to address this was to prove that the software was acting as per the legal requirements, and there was no harm if the ECI shared the source code of this software.

Pointing to the issue of the profiling of voters, which has reportedly been facilitated by technology, Mr. Kodali said: “The idea of unique identity is the problem. That allows for profiling of the voter. This is something we have been saying as part of the Aadhaar case.”

Ayushi Kar,data journalist at The Reporters’ Collective, said: “There is a need to open up the ERONET software to see what are the kind of requirements that have been baked into the system that have been hindering people’s acceptance in the voter list.”