Require the Election Commission of India to stop publicly exposing voters’ personal information, including detailed addresses and apartment details. Protect voter privacy and safety while maintaining electoral transparency.

 

 

Protect Voter Privacy: Stop Publicly Exposing Personal Details in Electoral Rolls

To: The Election Commission of India (ECI), Chief Election Commissioner, and concerned authorities

Our electoral rolls must protect voters — not expose them.

The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy. But exercising that right should not require citizens to have their personal information unnecessarily exposed to anyone who chooses to search for it.

Today, voter information available through electoral-roll systems can include personally identifying details such as a voter's name, age, address, relative's name and other identifying information. In some cases, detailed address information can make it possible to identify the exact residence or apartment of a voter.

The question we must ask is simple:

Does transparency in elections require exposing this much personal information to the entire public?

We believe it does not.

Why this matters

A person's electoral information can become a powerful tool when combined with information from other sources.

Publicly accessible voter details can potentially facilitate:

• Targeted scams and fraud
• Identity profiling
• Harassment and intimidation
• Unwanted solicitation
• Stalking and other safety risks
• Targeting of elderly people living alone
• Identification of families whose working members live in another city
• Combining voter information with other publicly available databases to build detailed profiles of individuals and households

The risk is particularly concerning for senior citizens and vulnerable people who may live alone while their children or other family members work in another city or abroad.

Your vote should be public only in the sense necessary to maintain a transparent electoral process.

Your home, your family and your personal identifying information should not become public property merely because you are a voter.

We are NOT asking for less transparency.

We support:

✅ Accurate electoral rolls
✅ Public verification mechanisms
✅ Transparency in the electoral process
✅ The ability of citizens to verify their own registration
✅ Mechanisms to detect duplicate, deceased or ineligible voters

But transparency can be achieved without unnecessarily exposing granular personal information about millions of ordinary citizens.

We demand that the Election Commission of India:

1. Review the extent of personal information publicly displayed in electoral rolls.
2. Minimise publicly accessible personally identifiable information (PII) to only what is genuinely necessary for electoral transparency.
3. Remove or mask granular residential information, wherever possible, while retaining effective voter verification mechanisms.
4. Introduce stronger safeguards for senior citizens, vulnerable individuals and people living alone.
5. Provide a secure method through which an individual can verify their own voter information without exposing unnecessary personal details to the entire public.
6. Conduct and publish a privacy and security impact assessment of publicly accessible electoral-roll data.
7. Establish clear safeguards against the aggregation, scraping, profiling and misuse of voter information.
8. Consult citizens, privacy experts and civil-society organisations before expanding public access to voter databases.

Democracy requires trust.

Citizens should never have to choose between exercising their constitutional right to vote and protecting the privacy and safety of their families.

A transparent election system and a privacy-respecting election system are not mutually exclusive.

We call upon the Election Commission of India to modernise the way electoral information is made publicly available and establish a system that protects both electoral integrity and citizens' privacy.

Protect voters. Protect families. Protect democracy.

STOP UNNECESSARY EXPOSURE OF VOTER PERSONAL INFORMATION.

Sign this petition and demand privacy by design in India's electoral system.

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