AADHAR
LINKED VOTER ID - GOVERNANCE
News:
60% of India's voters
linked Aadhaar to voter ID: RTI
What's
in the news?
●
Over 60% of India’s 94.5 crore voters in
India have linked their Aadhaar number to their voter IDs, the Election
Commission (EC) disclosed in a Right to Information response.
Key
takeaways:
●
The Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021
was passed to deduplicate electoral rolls by allowing election authorities to
collect the 12digit number from voters.
Why
does the government want this?
●
The EC conducts regular exercises to
maintain an updated and accurate record of the voter base.
●
A part of this exercise is to weed out duplication of voters, such as
migrant workers who may have been registered more than once on the electoral
rolls in different constituencies or for persons registered multiple times
within the same constituency.
●
As per the government, linkage of Aadhaar
with voter IDs will assist in ensuring that only one Voter ID is issued per
citizen of India.
Is
the linking of Aadhaar with one’s Voter ID mandatory?
●
In December 2021, Parliament passed the
Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021 to amend the Representation of the People
Act, 1950, inter alia.
●
Section
23(4) was inserted in the RPA, 1950.
●
It states that the electoral registration
officer may “for the purpose of establishing the identity of any person” or
“for the purposes of authentication of entries in electoral roll of more than
one constituency or more than once in the same constituency” for citizens
already enrolled, require them to furnish their Aadhaar numbers.
●
To reflect this, the government notified
changes to the Registration of Electors
Rules, 1960.
●
Rule 26B was added to provide that “every
person whose name is listed in the roll may intimate his Aadhar number to the
registration officer”.
●
Although, the use of discretionary language throughout the amendments have been
accompanied by assurances by both the government and the EC that linkage of the
Aadhaar with Voter ID is optional, this does not seem to be reflected in Form
6B issued under the new Rule 26B.
●
The preference to use Aadhaar for
verification and authentication, both by the state and private sector, stems
from two reasons.
a.
First, at the end of 2021, 99.7% of the adult Indian population had
an Aadhaar card.
b.
Second, since Aadhaar allows for biometric authentication, Aadhaar based
authentication and verification is considered more reliable, quicker and cost
efficient when compared to other IDs.
Puttaswamy
judgment:
●
In Puttaswamy, one of the questions that
the Supreme Court explored was whether the mandatory linking of Aadhaar with
bank accounts was constitutional or not.
●
The Court held that depriving a person of
their right to property for non-linkage fell foul of the test of proportionality.
●
It needs to be considered whether
requiring an Aadhaar holder to mandatorily provide Aadhaar for authentication
or verification would not be considered violative of their informational autonomy (right to privacy) which would allow them to
decide which official document they want to use for verification and
authentication.
●
Moreover, in Lal Babu Hussein (1995), the Supreme Court had held that the Right to vote cannot be disallowed by
insisting only on four proofs of identity - voters can rely on any other proof
of identity and obtain the right to vote.
Concerns:
●
The preference to Aadhaar for the purposes
of determining voters is puzzling as Aadhaar
is only a proof of residence and not a proof of citizenship thus linkage
will not remove voters who are not citizens of India from the electoral rolls.
●
The estimate
of error rates in biometric based authentication differ widely. As per the
UIDAI in 2018, Aadhaar based biometric authentication had a 12% error rate.
●
Lastly, civil society has highlighted that
linking of the two databases of electoral rolls and Aadhaar could lead to the
linkage of Aadhaar’s “demographic” information with voter ID information, and
lead to violation of the right to
privacy and surveillance measures by the state.
WAY
FORWARD:
●
It is important that the government
clarifies through correction in Form 6B that the linking is not mandatory and
expedites the enactment of a data protection legislation that allays concerns
of unauthorised processing of personal data held by the government.