EC plans to link voter IDs with Aadhaar to address fake voters

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.

Details:-

• 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 Elector Photo Identity Card (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.

• 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.