The Election Commission is expected to discuss the linking of Aadhaar with voter I-cards during a meeting with the Union home and legislative secretaries and the CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India on Tuesday.
The move comes after Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee revealed instances of multiple voters in different states having been issued with electors’ photo identity cards (EPIC) with the same serial number. She alleged an attempt to manipulate polls — due in Bengal next year — with bogus voters.
The poll panel has said the problem would be fixed in three months, and that electors cannot vote in a booth where they are not enrolled even if they have the same I-card number with someone so enrolled.
The Election Commission has known of the problem of multiple voters being issued with the same card numbers at least since 2020. That year, in its note to the chief electoral officers for an upcoming Special Summary Revision, the poll panel had issued guidelines to correct the anomaly. However, the commission has yet to reveal what action has been taken on the matter since then.
Trinamool national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee convened a virtual meeting on Saturday with around 4,000 party functionaries during which he announced a new setup in the organisation to maintain round-the-clock vigilance on the electoral roll.
Linking voter cards with Aadhaar, a senior commission source said, would reveal whether a voter is enrolled in more than one place. Aadhaar has no known duplication errors and comes with biometric data. Aadhaar-linking is therefore expected to smoothen any glitches at the poll panel’s end.
Currently, linking one’s Aadhaar to one’s voter card is voluntary although the wording on the form for collecting Aadhaar data is ambiguous and indirectly compels compliance, critics say.
The Election Commission told the Supreme Court in 2023 that around two-thirds of all voters had given their Aadhaar numbers.
The commission first tried to link voter cards with Aadhaar under the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (Neprap) in 2015. This was stalled later that year after the Supreme Court ruled that Aadhaar could only be used for rations, kerosene, and cooking gas connections.
In Telangana, RTI disclosures revealed that Neprap had led to the deletion of 55 lakh voter cards and that the field verifications were irregular.
In 2019, several prominent people — including RJD parliamentarian Manoj Jha, CPM politburo member Brinda Karat and former Union minister Yashwant Sinha — spoke out against the Aadhaar linking of voter cards.
“Taking into account the many cases of blatantly incorrect (Aadhaar) enrolments, leave aside fakes, linking Aadhaar with the electoral roll would weaken and contaminate the Indian electoral system,” they wrote to the commission.
They also cited the 2017-2018 State of Aadhaar report (by the private firm IDinsight), one of whose findings was that self-reported errors in Aadhaar data were one-and-a-half times the errors in the electoral database.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the right to privacy could be curtailed and Aadhaar data could be collected under certain legal criteria, the Centre in 2021 amended the Representation of the People Act, 1950, to allow the voluntary collection of Aadhaar data by the Election Commission.
The amended Act says that no eligible citizen can be denied enrolment or deleted from the electoral roll for not providing Aadhaar. However, it adds that one should have “sufficient cause” for refusing to give one’s Aadhaar.
Most Opposition parties took a stand against the amendment on the grounds that it violated the right to privacy. Voter data theft was reported from Andhra Pradesh in 2019, and Bengaluru in 2022, with private parties getting hold of the data.
In Andhra, the stolen data was allegedly used to find out which voters were beneficiaries of welfare schemes so that the ruling Telugu Desam Party’s campaign could be tailored to specifically attract these voters.