KCR Misused 2.16L Votes: Poll Official
The letter, which surfaced following an investigation by The Reporter’s Collective, was written a month after independent researcher Srinivas Kodali had alerted the ECI with his findings
HYDERABAD: The previous state government led by former chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao misused 2.16 lakh citizens' votes, including demographic details and photographs, said the Telangana Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) has confirmed in a letter to the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The letter, which surfaced following an investigation by The Reporter’s Collective, was written a month after independent researcher Srinivas Kodali had alerted the ECI with his findings.
Chief Electoral Officer C. Sudarshan Reddy confirmed that both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments had been granted access to voter data with the ECI’s approval to link voter ID cards with Aadhaar.
Between March 2019 and July 2021, Telangana’s IT and communications department used EPIC photographs accessed via a CEO API to run a facial-recognition-based pension verification system (PLCS), processing 2,16,488 EPIC IDs.
The CEO’s letter noted that the linking exercise was unusually carried out on data management systems maintained by the BRS government rather than on ECI servers.
It was at this stage, he said, that the data came under state control. Although the ECI later revoked permission for Aadhaar-voter ID linking, the data remained with the state, which “used it without notifying the CEO.”
The complaint also cited an RTI response obtained by privacy activist S. Q. Masood from the Telangana information technology department. Documents released under the RTI included an invoice from Posidex listing work on several government software projects, including pension verification — a system used to confirm whether beneficiaries are alive to receive pensions.
According to the invoice, Posidex developed “four web services under this module and integrated them with T-App, the Election Department (EPIC data), and Pension Department data.”
The data matching was performed on the State Resident Data Hub (SRDH), which stores demographic information such as names, ages, photographs, and addresses sourced from multiple databases.
Although the use of voter data for such purposes was discontinued later that year following a Supreme Court order, Reddy’s report indicates that the Telangana government retained the data and the ECI did not explicitly instruct its destruction.
Reddy also asked the state government to clarify whether private companies had access to the data, but its reply failed to address the question. His report is now under the ECI’s consideration.
Last month, in a 75-page complaint, Kodali alleged that voter photographs were reused by the Telangana government to build facial-recognition tools under its Real-Time Digital Authentication of Identity (RTDAI) programme. He said this database was later employed for face-based verification in pensions, licences, and college admissions.
Reacting to the CEO’s letter, Kodali posted on X: “The Chief Electoral Officer of Telangana seems to agree that there was misuse of electoral photographs for facial recognition by the government, but seemed unbothered to act on it.”