ECI, govt to discuss Voter ID-Aadhaar linkage to address discrepancies in electoral roll

Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar will on Tuesday hold a “high level discussion” on the linking of Voter IDs with Aadhaar amid a clamour to weed out Elector Photo Identity Card (EPIC) related discrepancies in the electoral roll in India.

Secretaries of the home and law ministries, along with the chief executive officer of UIDAI, are likely to discuss a “solution to resolving the issue of the same elector with multiple EPICs”, officials said on conditions of anonymity.

“The core issue of the meeting is to extend 100 percent coverage to all eligible people to register as electors. Logically, this would also mean that the CEC discusses crucial issues, such as removing the repeat EPIC issues so that the voting percentage increases. The scalability of the exercise would also be discussed as out of 99 crore electors, around two-thirds already have Aadhaar. However, since we have not seeded with the EPIC database, we will also discuss the modalities to do so,” they said.

However, the developments appear to contradict ECI’s previous position that Aadhaar linking is not mandatory. The legality of the entire process emanates from Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021, notified in 2022, wherein Aadhaar as an identity card was established.

While the amendment did not prescribe any action for not providing Aadhaar, the implementation may make the process effectively mandatory. The ECI in a submission to the Supreme Court, later stated that Aadhaar was not mandatory and that it was considering issuing “appropriate clarificatory changes” to enrolment forms to reflect this position.

However, form 6B, which is a “letter of information of Aadhaar number for the purpose of electoral roll authentication”, has not seen any changes wherein an elector can say that s/he does not want to furnish the Aadhaar.

Various civil society members have raised several red flags in the past on the mandatory linkage of Aadhaar.

“We know from recent experience with ration cards, job cards, bank accounts and so on that mandatory linkage of any document with Aadhaar can create enormous hassles for the public, especially poor people. It also leads to a monumental waste of time for frontline functionaries and reinforces the powers of the surveillance state. The rush to link voter IDs with Aadhaar, without any clarity about the issue this is supposed to address, ignores that experience. Quite likely, this will create more problems than it resolves,” development economist Jean Dreze, who is based in Jharkhand, told HT.

Officials in the Commission, however, argue that by using Aadhaar, a “majority of the repeat EPIC problem” will be resolved.

“Most of the people like to think that the issue will be resolved centrally, which would not be the case. Everything will happen at the Electoral Registration Officer’s level and all ground verification procedures will be followed for deletion. ECI has not been able to scale the deletion process, using photographic similar entries and demographic similar entries tools, at a national level. Therefore, Aadhaar linkages would definitely sort out the problem,” another official said.