India’s Election Commission to Link Voter IDs with Aadhaar

A Controversial Move

The Election Commission of India has started the process of linking voter ID cards with the Aadhaar database, a move previously halted by the Supreme Court a decade ago.

• This decision follows allegations by the Trinamool Congress and the Congress that at least 129 voters in Haryana and West Bengal had the same EPIC number.
• The Congress called it a “deliberate act of voter list manipulation” to aid the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
• Media reports suggest that the commission aims to remove duplicate voter IDs through this linkage, although the Election Commission’s press release did not mention the objective.

Experts Skeptical

While former bureaucrats believe that the move could solve the problem of duplicate voter ID cards, experts and activists in the technology and policy space are skeptical.

• Alok Prasanna Kumar, co-founder of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, argued that the problem should have been corrected at the administrative level.
• Kumar pointed out that the voter ID or EPIC is only a tool of identification and not a guarantee of the right to vote.
• Experts also argued that the move is at best a “pointless” exercise that will do little to clean up electoral rolls, and at worst, a “dangerous” move that could affect the right to vote of millions of Indians.
• They also pointed out that the exercise could make it impossible for voters to refuse linking their voter ID card to the Aadhaar database, making the biometrically linked identity project voluntary only in name but mandatory in effect.

A Compulsory Linkage?

A nationwide program to link voter IDs and Aadhaar was first launched in 2015, when the Election Commission announced the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) to create a “totally error free, and authenticated electoral roll”.

• The exercise was suspended in August that year following a Supreme Court order which ruled that Aadhaar could not be used for anything except receiving benefits through the public distribution system.
• After the pause in 2015, the Election Commission resumed collecting Aadhaar data in 2021.
• In 2021, the Modi government amended the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The amendment provided for linkage but without making it mandatory.
• However, the newest proposals could roll back those provisions.

The Telangana Warning

The 2015 exercise to link Aadhaar cards to voter IDs had grim consequences for the voters of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

• In December 2018, lakhs of voters found their names missing from the electoral rolls in Telangana.
• In 2019, information obtained under the Right to Information Act found that 55 lakh voters had been deleted from electoral rolls in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana after the exercise to link Aadhaar and voter ID cards.
• A Huffpost investigation found that one reason for these deletions was a software that scanned the state’s EPIC database and the Aadhaar database to try and match a voter’s EPIC information with their Aadhaar information.

The Electoral Roll

Since 2015, the Election Commission has collected the Aadhaar data of 66.23 crore voters, out of a total of 96.88 crore.

• Among these nearly 97 crore voters, duplication can happen in two ways: one, as the Opposition has pointed out, is that two voters can have the same EPIC numbers.
• Rangarajan, the former IAS officer, said that the linkage will remove duplications in the electoral roll.