Privacy as Pretext: ECI's Troubling Defence of Secrecy Deters Electoral Trust

The right to privacy and the right to free and fair elections need not be in conflict, writes Abhijay A.

Far from protecting dignity, the ECI's stance curtails equal participation, contradicting the mandate of Article 14 and the rights-based approach the Court has endorsed in its jurisprudence on inclusion.

(Image: Shruti Mathur/The Quint)

On 17 August 2025, the Election Commission of India (ECI) sought to defend its controversial decisions at a press conference: limiting the preservation of polling-day CCTV/webcast footage to 45 days and refusing to release machine-readable electoral rolls.

The Commission claimed that releasing such material would violate voters' privacy, particularly “mothers and sisters,” and warned of misuse if electoral rolls were made available in accessible formats.

These justifications may sound protective at the first glance. But when tested against the text of the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act, privacy jurisprudence, and the very logic of electoral transparency, they reveal a troubling attempt to use privacy as a shield for opacity.

Constitutional Boundaries and the Puttaswamy Test

The Constitutional starting point is clear. Article 324 vests the Commission with “superintendence, direction and control” over elections. Yet this is not unfettered power; it must be exercised within the boundaries of law and the rights enshrined in Part III of the Constitution.

Ever since the Supreme Court’s Puttaswamy ruling in 2017, privacy has been part of the fundamental rights under Article 21. But the Court was clear: if the state invokes privacy, it must show the law behind it, the purpose it serves, and why its method is the least intrusive way of doing so. The Election Commission invokes privacy, but its policies neither rest securely on statutory text nor meet the proportionality standard that the Court has insisted upon.

Let's look at the 45-days rule for CCTV footage first. The ECI’s revised instructions mandate that recordings from polling stations be destroyed unless required for litigation. The stated concern is that releasing such footage could expose individual voters and compromise secrecy. But the legal framework of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, tells a different story.

Section 128 criminalises any breach of the secrecy of how an elector voted. It does not prohibit the release of footage showing queues, polling staff at work, or the handling of electronic voting machines. To stretch this provision into a blanket bar against footage disclosure is to misread the law.

The Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 reinforces this point: they lay down strict custodial rules for ballot papers and materials, requiring judicial permission for inspection. The principle is preservation and supervision, not destruction. CCTV destruction isn’t “statutorily prohibited,” but it lacks legal mandate and contradicts preservation norms.

Proportionality and the Missing Privacy Safeguards

The Supreme Court’s proportionality rule makes the Commission’s stand even weaker. If privacy is the worry, why not blur faces, mute the sound, or allow viewing only under court oversight? Instead of exploring these simple fixes, the ECI has rushed to destruction.

Worse, it hasn’t even bothered with a proper privacy impact review—something the new Data Protection law itself expects from public bodies. Administrative instructions grounded only in vague fears of “misuse” do not meet the Constitutional threshold of reasoned justification.

The refusal to release machine-readable electoral rolls exposes the same flaw. Voter rolls are by law public documents; they are displayed for inspection and copies are distributed to recognised political parties.

The Commission’s concern is that if these lists are released in a searchable, machine-readable format, they may be misused or breach individual privacy. Yet the Representation of the People Act nowhere prohibits accessible formats. On the contrary, transparency in electoral rolls is the very foundation of clean elections. If names are wrongly deleted or multiple entries exist, public scrutiny is essential for correction.

The Supreme Court recently reinforced this principle by directing that searchable lists of deleted voters in Bihar be published, making clear that transparency is a Constitutional necessity, not a discretionary favour.

Here too, workarounds are obvious. Mask the house numbers, hide full IDs, or limit how often the data can be pulled. Instead of doing that, the ECI has chosen the blunt instrument of denial. This has particularly damaging consequences for persons with disabilities. Non-searchable PDFs are inaccessible to screen readers, making it difficult for visually impaired voters to verify their enrolment.

Far from protecting dignity, the Commission’s stance curtails equal participation, contradicting the mandate of Article 14 and the rights-based approach the Court has endorsed in its jurisprudence on inclusion.

Gendered Paternalism as Rhetoric

What makes the Commission’s defence even more problematic is its rhetorical turn. By invoking “mothers and sisters” as a reason to suppress footage, it resorts to cultural sentiment rather than Constitutional principle.

This gendered paternalism presumes that women need protection from being visible in civic spaces. But women are equal stakeholders in electoral transparency. Their privacy can be secured by anonymisation and redaction, not by erasing evidence that ensures accountability. To cloak secrecy in the language of women’s modesty is to instrumentalise their identity as a pretext for institutional opacity.

This approach undermines not only legal principles but also democratic trust. In an age of rising concern about “vote chori,” ghost voters, and unexplained discrepancies between turnout data and results, transparency in election management is indispensable.

Destroying footage after 45 days and withholding usable rolls deprives citizens, parties, and civil society of the very tools needed to verify the integrity of elections.

Privacy is not a trump card against accountability; the Supreme Court in Puttaswamy made clear that privacy is relational, contextual, and subject to balancing with competing constitutional values. Free and fair elections—guaranteed under Article 324 and flowing from the democratic structure of the Constitution itself—are one such value.

Legally too, the ECI is on thin ice. It stretches Section 128 of the RPA beyond recognition, ignores the Conduct of Election Rules, ducks the Right to Information Act, and hides behind the Data Protection law without following its safeguards. And when it comes to privacy, the Court has already said: choose the narrowest restriction possible, not sweeping bans.

The Commission has done the opposite. By replacing transparency with administrative fiat and cultural rhetoric, it risks eroding its institutional credibility.

Towards a Genuine Balance of Rights

If the ECI is serious about protecting both voter dignity and electoral integrity, it must shift course. Footage should be preserved securely for longer periods, released under judicial or audited supervision, and sanitised through redaction techniques.

Electoral rolls should be provided in accessible, machine-readable formats with appropriate masking of sensitive identifiers. Privacy assessments must be published, legal reasoning made transparent, and the balancing of interests carried out openly. These steps would honour both the secrecy of the ballot and the transparency of the process — a balance that the law, the Constitution, and democratic trust all require.

At its press conference, the ECI chose the easier path: invoking privacy to justify opacity. But privacy, properly understood, is not about erasure of evidence; it is about dignified participation and proportionate safeguards.

By treating it as a cover for secrecy, the Commission has inverted its meaning. The right to privacy and the right to free and fair elections need not be in conflict. What is in conflict is transparency and institutional convenience — and at present, convenience appears to be winning. That is a constitutional failure, and one that the ECI must correct before electoral trust suffers irreparable harm.

(The author is a policy analyst and independent researcher specialising in international relations, public policy, and global governance. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)