Kerala Police launches probe into ‘leak’ of electoral roll data from Chief Electoral Officer’s office

Team Udayavani, Jul 3, 2021, 8:29 PM IST

The Crime Branch wing of the Kerala Police has registered an FIR and initiated a probe over a complaint filed by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) here alleging leak of electoral roll data.

The complaint was filed by the CEO office alleging that the computer in the office was ”hacked” and the data of electors were leaked.

Ahead of the April 6 assembly elections, senior Congress legislator Ramesh Chennithala and former leader of the opposition in the state assembly had on March 31 released details of 4.3 lakh voters whose names were allegedly figured multiple times in the voters’ list through a website named ”http://operationtwins.com”\noperationtwins.com.

”We have filed a complaint with the police as we suspect that our computer was hacked and data were leaked. It seems someone had helped in leaking the data from the computer used by Keltron staff who were deputed to the CEO office during the election,” a senior source from the CEO office told PTI on Saturday.

Keltron aided the Commission in data management and security.

The ruling CPI(M) had on April 1 accused Chennithala of ”leaking” the personal data of Kerala voters to a foreign-based website by publishing the information from its IP address registered in Singapore.

Meanwhile, Chennithala said registering of FIR for ”pointing out the mistakes in the electoral roll” was against the democratic set up of the country.

”Instead of removing double votes and bogus voters, the election commission is trying to target those who had brought out the truth,” Chennithala said in a statement.

The crime branch has registered the FIR invoking various provisions of the IPC including conspiracy and the IT Act.

The CPI(M) had alleged that even the personal information of voters were analysed and published on the website.

”Serious legal issues are involved in the act of sharing personal information along with the photo of the individuals to a foreign-based company,” senior Left leader M A Baby had said.

The Left leader had asked whether Chennithala had received any prior permission from any individual for the same.

Chennithala had alleged that a scrutiny of the electoral rolls would prove that there were more than 4,34,042 fake and multiple entry voters in the state’s voters’ list for the April 6 Assembly polls.

However, the Election Commission of India (ECI) had informed the Kerala High Court that its intensive analysis has led to the identification of only 38,586 Demographically Similar Entries (DSEs) from 3,16,671 entries in electoral rolls.