The banner headline in The Hindu proclaimed “ECI sets the ball rolling on linking voter ID card with Aadhaar” and went on to say that the decision was taken at a high-level meeting the full Election Commission (EC), led by chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, had with home secretary Govind Mohan; IT and electronics secretary, S. Krishnan; UIDAI CEO Bhuvnesh Kumar and technical experts of the EC.
Commenting on this move, the Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts of the Congress in a statement said that the EC must confer with all political parties and stakeholders and assure them that “there are sufficient guardrails to not deny a single eligible voter the right to vote”.
The party should have realised that no amount of ‘guardrails’ can safeguard a fundamentally flawed and unconstitutional move!
The EC said that the linking of electors’ photo ID cards (EPIC) with Aadhaar would be done only as per Article 326, which it noted says that voting rights can only be given to citizens, while an Aadhaar card simply establishes a person’s identity.
It further said the linking would also take into effect as per the provisions of Sections 23(4), 23(5) and 23(6) of the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1950 and in line with the Supreme Court judgment in WP (civil) No. 177/2023.
According to Section 23(6) of the RP Act, 1950:
“No application for inclusion in electoral rolls shall be deleted for inability of an individual to furnish or intimate Aadhaar number due to such sufficient cause as may be prescribed”.
This, noted The Hindu, means that “linkage would be done only in cases where Aadhaar has been submitted voluntarily by the elector”.
These assurances are empty rhetoric considering the fact that the EC informed the Supreme Court in 2023 that it had by then uploaded nearly 66.23 crore Aadhaar cards in the process of finalising electoral rolls.
The EC achieved this through coercive measures as banks did to link Aadhaar with bank accounts before the Supreme Court ruled otherwise.
Now let us look at this move on its merits. Even as the law to facilitate this linkage was being enacted in 2021, the Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) issued a public statement signed by 104 former senior civil servants, most of whom have direct experience in voter registration and conducting elections.
Calling this a dangerous move, the CCG’s statement said that the
“requirement of Aadhaar verification, even if voluntary, from a prospective or registered voter implies the superimposition of a government-issued identity card for identity and address verification that could seriously undermine the independence and integrity of the EC and cast doubts on the fairness of the entire electoral process.”
Also read: When a Voter Takes the Election Commission to Task for Denying Her Right to Vote
The CCG gave several reasons why the move to require Aadhaar verification for voter IDs is defective, bad in law, in bad faith and liable to potential misuse by the state:
1. The voter ID is issued on the basis of citizenship, while the Aadhaar card is issued on the basis of identity, without proof of citizenship being required. Section 9 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 is clear that Aadhaar may not be used as proof of address, age, gender, citizenship or relationship.
Even if it is argued that voter IDs may be wrongly issued to non-citizens, verification by Aadhaar in no way solves this vexing problem; in fact, it is quite likely that even non-citizens may be registered as voters if Aadhaar is used as the only proof.
2. Unlike Aadhaar enrolments, which need only the production of existing documents, voter IDs are based on physical verification and “house visits” by a booth-level officer. The voter ID is certified by the electoral registration officer, while there is no certification of the Aadhaar by the UIDAI.
It cannot be ruled out that, with the linkage of Aadhaar numbers to voter IDs and in the absence of physical verification by the election authorities, efforts may be made to manipulate electoral rolls by getting persons registered as voters in constituencies where they do not reside.
3. The legislation which inserted sub-sections 4, 5 and 6 in Section 23 of the RP Act and clauses ‘hhha’ and ‘hhhb’ in Section 28(2) of the Act makes it evident that the Union government is dissembling when it states that linking the Aadhaar number to the voter ID is voluntary. These new insertions, in effect, make it mandatory for a voter to furnish her/his Aadhaar details or risk disenfranchisement.
The new sub-section 6 of Section 23 is especially revealing in its intentions. It states:
“No application for inclusion of name in the electoral roll shall be denied and no entries in the electoral roll shall be deleted for inability of an individual to furnish or intimate Aadhaar number due to such sufficient cause as may be prescribed.”
The possible mischief that this wording can give rise to is made amply clear by the subsequent clauses in the Amendment Act which permit the government to prescribe, under its rule-making powers, the process for the intimation of Aadhaar numbers by voters.
Rules made by the government require no parliamentary approval. A rule can, therefore, easily be introduced, making the furnishing of Aadhaar numbers a prerequisite for voter enrolment.
The scope for large-scale deletion of names from the electoral rolls can then become a distinct possibility, given that many existing voters may not (or may choose not to) furnish their Aadhaar details to the electoral registration officer.
There is also the likelihood that the UIDAI’s powers to omit or deactivate Aadhaar numbers under Section 23(g) of the Aadhaar Act could lead to widespread deletions from the electoral rolls.
4. The experience to date in attempting to clean up the database registries of other government programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the public distribution scheme using the Aadhaar database has been discouraging: the names of many beneficiaries have been allegedly arbitrarily deleted from systems without any notice, resulting in mass disentitlement.
5. Linking Aadhaar numbers to voter IDs will open the floodgates for the illegal profiling and targeting of voters, especially in the run-up to elections, when the model code of conduct is not in place.
There is a distinct possibility that voter IDs linked to Aadhaar cards and thence to mobile phones could be linked to social media. This social media can be linked to algorithms that are in turn linked to user interests/views. Without a robust data protection law and accompanying regulatory mechanisms in place, voter profiling, selective exclusion and targeted campaigns are all possible.
6. The 2016 presidential campaign in the US brought to light the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Justice B.N. Srikrishna, former judge of the Supreme Court, who chaired the expert committee that drafted the Data Protection Bill, categorically condemned the linkage of voter IDs with Aadhaar as “the most dangerous situation”.
His graphic warning was that “instead of having a Cambridge Analytica you’ll have a Delhi Analytica, a Mumbai Analytica, a Calcutta Analytica.”
The question is whether the EC’s task is to take care of the state interest or safeguard the citizen’s interest. Photo: soumen82hazra/Pixabay. CC0.
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Till date, neither has the EC responded to nor answered any of these serious concerns which it is duty-bound to do.
In the meantime, the apprehension expressed in (3) above has come true in the way Form 6b (which was introduced to collect the Aadhaar numbers of voters) has been structured. At present this form lacks options for voters to abstain from providing their Aadhaar number; it offers just two choices: either provide your Aadhaar number or declare that “I am not able to furnish my Aadhaar because I don’t have Aadhaar number.”
The Union law ministry is to amend this, but the voter will have to offer an explanation as to why they are not providing their Aadhaar number.
This is nothing but coercing the voter and a fraud on the registration process.
There are also serious issues on the very integrity of the Aadhaar document. The Union government said that of a total of about 82.93 crore Aadhaar enrolments generated by FY25, about 9.73 crore were rejected for duplication, quality or technical reasons.
In January 2018, The Tribune exposed a major scandal wherein just by paying Rs 500, one could gain access to a billion Aadhaar card details in ten minutes.
The report said:
“Today, The Tribune “purchased” a service being offered by anonymous sellers over WhatsApp that provided unrestricted access to details for any of the more than 1 billion Aadhaar numbers created in India thus far.
It took just Rs 500, paid through Paytm, and ten minutes in which an “agent” of the group running the racket created a “gateway” for this correspondent and gave a login ID and password. Lo and behold, you could enter any Aadhaar number in the portal, and instantly get all particulars that an individual may have submitted to the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India), including name, address, postal code (PIN), photo, phone number and email.
What is more, The Tribune team paid another Rs 300, for which the agent provided “software” that could facilitate the printing of the Aadhaar card after entering the Aadhaar number of any individual.”
In March of the same year, reported Scroll,
“A French security researcher claimed that he had found details of 20,000 Aadhaar cards in the public domain in a three-hour span. The Twitter user, who goes by the name Elliot Alderson, has reported security flaws in various Indian government websites over the past few months, including some that were fixed after he reported them.”
All that the UIDAI has done is to deny these reports and try to silence the media when it publishes them!
There are also concerns that linking EPIC with Aadhaar can lead to large-scale disenfranchisement. For instance, many voters were left out of the electoral roll in Telangana in the aftermath of a similar linkage program; it was reported that officials did not fully conduct door-to-door verification in the Hyderabad area. The UIDAI also said in 2018 that the rate of authentication failure for government services was up to 12%. The failure rate could be much higher for electoral rolls.
It was argued that this linkage would fulfil “legitimate state interest”, laid down as one of the criteria by the Supreme Court in the Justice K.S. Puttaswamy case while judging the permissible limit for the invasion of privacy.
But the question is whether the EC’s task is to take care of the state interest or safeguard the citizen’s interest.
There are a lot of similarities between the Aadhaar-EPIC linkage and linking of Aadhaar numbers with bank accounts. The latter was challenged in the Supreme Court in M.G. Devasahayam and Ors v. Union of India and Anr.
The Supreme Court went into its constitutionality and declared the linking of an Aadhaar card with a bank account as the ‘deprivation of property’ and therefore unconstitutional.
Linking the same card with a voter ID could deprive citizens of their basic democratic right to elect a government and therefore would be doubly unconstitutional.
In the event, persisting with the linking of Aadhaar with the EPIC would finish off whatever integrity is left with India’s election system. What is more, voter profiling and disenfranchisement would make a lethal combination that could sink India’s electoral democracy.
The EC would be well-advised to drop this move altogether and take it up only after addressing the serious concerns raised by the CCG and other experts, who are important stakeholders of electoral democracy, on the subject. Mere closed-door meetings and confabulations with political parties will not do!
M.G. Devasahayam, formerly of the IAS, is coordinator, Citizens Commission on Elections.
