Why EC's Idea to Link Voter ID With Aadhaar May Not Help Weed Out 'Fake' Voters

EC's plan to link voter ID with Aadhaar faces criticism over potential privacy issues and voter exclusion risks.

ECI's plan to link voter ID with Aadhaar faces criticism over potential privacy issues and voter exclusion risks.

(Illustration: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Video Editor: Kriti Saxena

Camera: Athar Rather, Shiv Kumar Maurya

The Election Commission of India (ECI), in a press note dated 18 March, announced that it intends to link voter ID with Aadhaar in a bid to weed out concerns around 'fake' voters being registered in electoral rolls.

"Technical consultations between Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and experts of ECI are to begin soon," the poll body said.

The UIDAI is a statutory authority established by the Government of India (GOI) to issue Aadhaar.

The poll watchdog said that linking of voter ID and Aadhaar will be done as per Article 326 of the Indian Constitution (which proves that elections to the Lok Sabha and to the Legislative Assembly of every State shall be on the basis of adult suffrage), the Representation of the People Act, 1951, and the the 2023 EC submission in the Supreme Court that linking of Aadhaar number was not mandatory for electoral roll authentication of new voters.

This means that providing Aadhaar details will remain voluntary, even though anybody declining to provide Aadhaar number will have to state the reason in Form 6B which deals with the providing of Aadhaar number for the purpose of electoral roll authentication.

Currently, this Form allows voters an option to not link Aadhaar with voter ID only under the condition that they don't have an Aadhaar. The ECI, however, has on multiple occasions clarified that linking the two IDs is not mandatory.

While this move by the poll body came against the backdrop of Opposition's allegations of irregularities in voter rolls in states such as Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Delhi, it has raised fresh concerns around privacy, citizenship, and voting rights.

A Technocratic 'Fantasy'

The move to link voter IDs with Aadhaar came after the Trinamool Congress (TMC) raised concerns over voters from states such as Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab have same EPIC numbers as those in West Bengal.

An EPIC or Electors' Photo Identification Card carries the EPIC number — a 10-digit unique identification number assigned by the ECI to each registered voter. The party alleged that this was an attempt to "disenfranchise" voters of West Bengal.

Following this, the poll watchdog, on 7 March, in a press released, had stated that it will address the "decades long issue of duplicate EPIC numbers within the next three months."

Speaking to The Quint, Apar Gupta, lawyer and co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), however, pointed out that linking voter ID with Aadhaar is not the solution for the problem ECI is looking to tackle.

"The very basis of Aadhaar enrolment is residency rather than citizenship and the database that they are trying to purify or perfect is built on the basis of citizenship," Gupta said.

"There has been a complete effort by the Indian State to enrol everyone into Aadhaar and that has been called a process of mandatory seeding in which it has been required at each level to make sure that every person, even more than the recorded population of cities and states, gets an Aadhaar. Hence, not only the basis of it but the very sanctity of that database comes into question."

Apar Gupta, IFF Co-Founder

Experts, including Gupta, suggested that the risk of linking Aadhaar with voter IDs is that it may result in inclusion of people who are already there in the electoral rolls, as a second or third entry.

Gupta added that there is a "technocratic fantasy" that exists within a certain section of Indian intelligentsia that the way to improve voter participation rates is through digitising the very process of casting your vote.

"We know based on our experience and research studies that biometrics don't work flawlessly, the system is far from perfect and results in exclusion. The problem today is not with voter participation rates. The problem is that there is a growing lack of trust in the electoral process. This exercise will not help build that trust," he said.

In 2022, the IFF, which Gupta co-founded, released an exhaustive resource to ensure that citizens can protect themselves from coercive linking of Aadhaar with their Voter ID. It can be accessed here.

'Violation of the Right To Vote'

Experts argued that the linking of Aadhaar and Voter ID to do de-duplication won't work unless everyone's Aadhaar is linked. It is possible that due to a mismatch between what exists as recorded information in the Aadhaar database, when it is matched against the electoral database there is a deletion of an entry in the electoral database and that results in mass exclusion of registered voters.

"The ECI in the past has deleted voters who haven't linked their Aadhaar from electoral rolls. At least 20 lakh people have lost their right to voter during the assembly elections in Telangana in 2018," said Srinivas Kodali, an independent researcher who specialises in data and cybersecurity issues.

"The current decision to link it again is ECI violating people's right to vote," he added.

Additionally, if EPIC is linked with Aadhaar, it might result in the sanctity of vote being destroyed.

Gupta explained this in detail: "If a person, at the voting centre is asked to authenticate their identity via biometrics, and the technical design of the system is prone to a breach, it may lead to destruction of the sanctity of vote."

Any kind of biometric authentication requires the Aadhaar authority to save a transaction token and meta data related to it. If not scrutinised properly, this token, through reverse engineering might lead to the secrecy of ballot being destroyed.

Risk of Disenfranchisement and Increased Voter Micro-targeting 

According to a 2021 report by the World Privacy Forum, 160 countries collect biometric data for national ID systems. Critics, however, argue that these systems often become tools of state surveillance creating risks to privacy and anonymity. Their data ecosystems are often insecure and unregulated, consisting of multiple private and public actors, networks, and databases. This creates opportunities for private actors to access personal data, making them an attractive target for malicious hackers. 

While the aim to use biometric ID for voter authentication is to prevent duplication of voters, curb election fraud, and increase voter participation, a 2022 Brookings research argued that the utility of these systems depends on the context in which they are deployed, such as the independence of a given country’s electoral management body, poll policy and training, civic education and voter confidence, and overall cost. 

"Election management bodies often do not have the expertise or resources to design and implement their own biometric systems and are thus reliant on private actors to install and manage these systems. These private actors further complicate the information ecosystem in which personal data circulates," argued Patrick Jones, author of this research.

In India's case, the biometric system (Aadhaar) was developed by UIDAI, a statutory body under GOI.

'Clear Acknowledgement of Our Charges': Opposition Extends Support

The Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts (EAGLE) formed by Congress to look into all election-related issues, welcomed ECI's move.

"The Congress party supports constructive solutions that ensure clean voter lists, in line with Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar's assertion made in 1949 that 'electoral rolls are the most fundamental in a democracy and the independence of the electoral process is a fundamental right'," the statement read.

The committee, however, also emphasised that no adult should be "denied" the right to vote due to Aadhaar linkage.

It added: "The Congress party urges the Election Commission to consult with all political parties and stakeholders, and assure them that there are sufficient guardrails to not deny the right to vote to even a single eligible citizen as well as the privacy of any single voter is not breached through the process."