B S Baranwal

Election Commission's own software contains a lock written for one state, and only one - West Bengal. An independent audit of the Commission's portal ECINET, reported by @htTweets has found a feature that can bar Electoral Registration Officers and Assistant EROs, only in West Bengal, from two critical functions: 🔹Reviewing voters' enumeration forms 🔹Viewing the notice and hearing dashboard Officers in every other state have access to both. The audit found no such exclusion anywhere else in India. The audit was carried out by the civic-tech initiative Charchagram. Its data scientist Saurav Rajput examined ECINET's publicly served code on October 2, 6, 7 and 9. The feature was still there in code fetched as recently as October 19. In his words: West Bengal is separately hard-coded in the codebase & excluded from it (for ERO and AERO). Understand what is at stake. The enumeration form page holds each voter's details - name, voter ID, who submitted the form, the documents uploaded & the booth level officer's recommendation. It holds the ERO/AERO-Document & Hearing-Order files, along with the buttons to send a form back to the BLO or flag it. The notice & hearing dashboard is where notices are tracked and hearings processed. It is where the decision is made about who stays on the roll and who is removed. Under the law, the ERO is the officer responsible for preparing and revising the electoral roll. If ECINET can shut Bengal's EROs out of the forms & the hearings, the country has a right to know who would be reviewing them instead. On September 24, the Election Commission told the country that ECINET is a decentralised platform and that nobody else can perform their statutory function on ECINet, including any other officer of ECI. If only EROs and AEROs can perform these functions, and the code can bar Bengal's EROs and AEROs from the forms and the hearings, then the Commission's two claims cannot both stand. Now look at the timeline - 🔹September 26: After two Election Commissioners raised objections, the Commission set up a committee to examine whether ECINET complies with the law, following complaints that control of electoral rolls had been centralised. 🔹September 28: Bengal exception has existed in the code at least since this date. 🔹October 16: A new build of the app is introduced. Bengal exception is still in it. 🔹October 19: The exception is still present in the live code. While the Commission said it was examining whether its system had been centralised, the code continued to treat one state differently from every other. When Hindustan Times sent the Election Commission a questionnaire, it did not respond. Nation demands- 🔹Explain why ECINET's code contains a West Bengal-only exclusion for EROs and AEROs. 🔹Name who ordered this code to be written & when. 🔹Disclose whether this restriction has ever been switched on, in which constituencies, and for how long. 🔹Reveal who reviewed Bengal's enumeration forms and hearings during any period the restriction was active. 🔹Publish ECINET's access rules and access logs, and place the portal before an independent technical audit with the findings made public. Code does not write itself. A hard coded exception for one state is a deliberate choice & someone made it. The Election Commission must tell nation who made that choice & why. From Karnataka's "dead" voters to Delhi's "untraceable" citizens & now a Bengal only exception in the Commission's own software, the same question keeps coming up: who is really in control of India's voter rolls? The vote belongs to the people, not to whoever controls the code. hindustantimes.com/india-new…