A 24-year-old cyber cafe owner was arrested in Saharanpur on Friday evening on the charge of illegally accessing Election Commission of India data and making fake voter I-cards, police said after the poll panel issued a statement mentioning the scam.

Officers, however, stayed tight-lipped about the ECI’s assertion that one of its data entry operators in the district too had been arrested for sharing his official user ID and password with prime accused Vipul Saini.

An election data analyst told The Telegraph that the data entry operator would be an employee at the office of the district magistrate, who is the district electoral officer.

Saharanpur senior superintendent of police (SSP) S. Channappa told reporters that Saini had hacked the ECI website. But he made no mention of the data entry operator.

“Vipul Saini runs his own computer shop at village Maccharheri in the Nakur area of Saharanpur district. He used to log in with the help of the same password that the ECI uses,” Channappa said.

“Saini made 10,000 voter IDs in the past three months,” he said.

On Friday, the ECI had said: “Assistant electoral roll officers are mandated to provide citizen-centric services including printing of voter ID cards…. (A) data entry operator of one of the AERO offices has illegally shared his user ID (and) password with a private service provider in Saharanpur’s Nakur sub-division to print some voter ID cards.”

It added: “Both these persons have been arrested. The ECI’s database is absolutely safe and secure.”

Channappa didn’t take calls from this newspaper. Superintendent of police (Saharanpur rural) Atul Sharma and Nakur circle officer Arvind Singh Pundir said said only the SSP and the cyber cell had any information to provide. Pundir said he knew “only about one arrest”.

An officer of the cyber cell of the Saharanpur police said: “We don’t know who else was arrested besides Saini.”

The election data analyst, who asked not to be identified, said: “The ECI appoints a data operator in every district. He or she is authorised to log into the ECI website and make necessary entries. Sometimes they share data unofficially with their friends or members of political parties. In Saharanpur, the data operator shared the password with an outsider. I noticed that the ECI had blocked most of its data over the past week without explanation.”