The issue of linking India’s voters’ list with the Aadhaar database is in news again with the surreptitious passage of The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021 in Parliament recently. The fact that it was passed hurriedly with hardly any discussion is enough to raise suspicion. But there is more to it, and part of that is contained in the history of this idea.

That history began March 3, 2015: The Election Commission of India (ECI) launched “a comprehensive programme” — the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) — “with the prime objective of bringing a totally error-free and authenticated electoral roll”.

One of the stated objectives of the NERPAP was linking EPIC (Electoral Photo Identity Card) data with the Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) Aadhaar data with the laudable objective of authenticating the EPIC data.

The ECI took up this programme with a lot of enthusiasm. By August 2015, when the Supreme Court ordered a ban on this linking, 320 million voters had already been linked to their Aadhaar IDs.

The ECI apparently believed (and seems to still do) that such a linkage would enhance the credibility of electoral rolls. Given that the reliability of Aadhaar itself has been (and still is) under cloud, it is hard to understand the ECI’s faith in it.

Doubts over the efficacy and intent of the NERPAP drive, ostensibly to create “a totally error-free and authenticated electoral roll”, resurfaced in early 2018: Missing voters were discovered in some states, starting with Karnataka where the names of some 6.6 million voters of a total 50 million had gone missing. More than 1.5 million names were reportedly restored after the Election Commission ran a verification drive.

This is why there is a very serious apprehension that the linking of electoral roll data with Aadhaar may result in the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters.

The usual remedy that is touted officially — that anyone who thinks her / his name has been inappropriately removed from the elector roll, can always approach the ECI for reinstatement of the name — does not carry much weight for a simple reason: Not everyone whose name was, or is, deleted due to infirmities in the Aadhaar ecosystem, which are by now well-known, will or can approach the ECI for re-enrolment.

Given that deprived sections of society are usually the worst hit by such exclusion, many won’t have the wherewithal to even approach the ECI. This apprehension of disenfranchisement acquires sinister undertones if some of these deletions are systematic bids to deprive specific groups of their voting rights, as has been mentioned as a possibility.

There is more in the history of this attempted linkage. Two former chief election commissioners (CEC) have been quoted as saying, on conditions of anonymity, that the UIDAI had lobbied long and hard to link voter IDs and Aadhaar as a way to legitimise the controversial biometric ID project.

“They said we should integrate Aadhaar with electoral rolls to eliminate duplicates; the Commission held the view that we should hold off until we fully understand the implications,” said one of these former CECs.

Finally, the EC seems to have succumbed in February 2015 when HS Brahma was CEC, and the exercise was launched in March 2015.

The Supreme Court in its August 2015 interim order restricted the use of Aadhaar to the Public Distribution System (PDS), and the distribution of liquefied petroleum gas and kerosene, thus putting a stop to the ECI’s much-touted scheme. In its final order in September 2018, the apex court held privacy a fundamental right and said linking of Aadhaar with voters’ ID data could not be done unless there is a specific law subject to certain conditions such as a specific interest of the state, and the test of proportionality is satisfied.

This is why the ECI wrote to the Union law secretary in August 2019, proposing amendments to the Representation of People Act (RP Act) and the Aadhaar Act to empower it to collect and use Aadhaar data for “cleaning” voters’ lists as a “back-end exercise”.

To create a semblance of following the Supreme Court judgment, and to create a paper trail to prove the same, the Union law ministry wrote a pro-forma letter to the ECI asking it to explain how it had ensured that the Supreme Court’s order is not violated.

However, the ECI and the Law Ministry need to remember that the court said: “We will also make it clear that the Aadhaar card scheme is purely voluntary and it cannot be made mandatory …” (emphasis added). The court also added: “No deserving person will be denied service for failure of authentication.”

Therefore, if, in the implementation of the amended RP Act, even one eligible voter is prevented from casting her / his vote, the ECI will risk the possible consequence of violating a specific direction of the highest court of the land.

Then there is also a fundamental conceptual inconsistency in combining these two databases. Aadhaar — as has often been pointed out even by government authorities — was designed as, and is, a proof of identity; if stretched further, it’s a proof of residence. On the other hand, the registration of a person as a voter is a proof of citizenship which confers on the holder the right to vote.

Claiming that combining these two will improve the accuracy of one, particularly when the other one is also not error-free, is something quite strange.

There are also two practical considerations which go against this proposal. One is the difficulty or at least uncertainty of matching one’s finger prints or iris impression. This is a common experience which this writer has personally faced several times.

Imagine an illiterate voter at a remote village being asked by the polling officer to show her Aadhaar and to verify finger prints or iris; she then is told these do not match, thus she is not allowed to vote.

It is not difficult to replicate the scenario in slums and some other groups which can be easily identified and differentiated — remember “systematic bids to deprive specific groups of their voting rights”?

The other is a common sight in cities where one sees auto-rickshaws with stickers proclaiming ‘Get Aadhaar Made in 5 Minutes”. Doesn’t it speak volumes of the accuracy and reliability of Aadhaar? And there are still people who believe that such a scheme can verify, authenticate, de-duplicate, and purify the electoral rolls!

Correcting the electoral rolls is one of the most important tasks that the ECI is mandated to do. The only way it can be done in a society such as India is the hard way, by actually going from door to door. The ECI’s quest for quick fixes and technical solutions such as the Aadhaar ecosystem are likely to do more harm than good.

Another possibility is that the ECI is under pressure to do this, not an end in itself, but as a preparatory step to pave the way for other ambitions of the government of the day such as simultaneous elections or one-nation-one-election, which was discussed for almost three years with no acceptable consensus.

In sum, linking the electoral roll data with the Aadhaar data set is not a good idea and should not be done.

The article was originally published in Down To Earth.

After a gap of six years, the dubious linkage between voters IDs with Aadhaar numbers is back in the news.

It was reported on June 8 that the chief election commissioner had written to the Union law minister requesting the minister to expedite a long list of proposals for electoral reforms. Linking of voter ID information with the Aadhaar database of the UIDAI was one of the prominent proposals.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) taking up this proposal once again was a surprise. It is not a new proposal. The first attempt was made in March 2015 when the Election Commission of India (ECI) launched “a comprehensive programme”, called the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) “with the prime objective of bringing a totally error-free and authenticated electoral roll”. One of the objectives of the NERPAP was to link and authenticate the EPIC (Electoral Photo Identity Card) data with the UIDAI’s Aadhaar data.

This had to be stopped because on August 11, 2015, the Supreme Court passed an interim order prohibiting Aadhaar from being used for “any purpose” other than the state-facilitated distribution of food grain and cooking fuel such as kerosene and LPG. The ECI decided to stop the drive by its order of August 13, 2015.

Despite the immediate suspension, the damage had already been done: “(N)early 55 lakh voters … were left out of the electoral process due to the linkage of electoral photo identity card (EPIC) and Aadhaar taken up by the Election Commission in 2015.”

Possible reason(s) for ECI’s keenness

To understand the keenness of the ECI to re-introduce this, we have to go into some history.

Former chief election commissioner H.S. Brahma is reported to have said that the work on this initiative started in 2012. Two former chief election commissioners (CECs) have been quoted as saying, on the condition of anonymity, that the UIDAI had lobbied long and hard to link voter IDs and Aadhaar as a way to legitimise the controversial biometric ID project. They said while they agreed in principle to integrate Aadhaar with electoral rolls to eliminate duplicates; “the Commission held the view that we should hold off until we fully understand the implications,” said one of these former CECs.

One of the CECs also said that linkage of voter cards with Aadhaar numbers was agreed to during a meeting with Nandan Nilekani but nothing of significance was done till H.S. Brahma took over as CEC on January 16, 2015 (his tenure lasted till April 18, 2015). It has also been reported that Brahma “made it a priority to push through the seeding process”.

The ECI, the UIDAI and the government have been quite vociferous and aggressive in defending, and promoting, the proposed linkage. They have given four broad reasons in support of the linkage:

1. improving the accuracy of the electoral rolls, by weeding out duplication and misrepresentation in electoral rolls;
2. assistance in the ECI’s plans to implement advanced mechanisms such as electronic and internet-based voting;
3. giving ‘remote’ voting rights to domestic migrants; and
4. to facilitate proxy voting which may require Aadhaar backing for voter verification.

The government has already passed an amendment in the Lok Sabha to allow NRIs to participate in elections via proxies.

All four of the above reasons are doubtful and debatable, with a lot of ifs and buts.

So far as “improving the accuracy of the electoral rolls, by weeding out duplication and misrepresentation in electoral rolls” is concerned, given that the reliability of Aadhaar itself is under a cloud, it is hard to understand the ECI’s faith in it.

Doubts over the efficacy and intent of the NERPAP drive resurfaced in early 2018 with the discovery of missing voters in some states, starting with Karnataka, where some 6.6 million voter names, of a total of 50 million, had gone missing. Also, NERPAP data sheets were found “lying around” in several locations because at least some of the personnel tasked with collecting the data had continued to do so for quite some time after the August 2015 Supreme Court ban kicked in. This was because follow-up instructions from the ECI took time to reach the ground level. Even after the data-collection drive had finally stopped, in the absence of clear instructions on how to store and/or dispose of data sheets, they were apparently put away quite haphazardly, by the ground personnel. This only served to further underline doubts over how the linking exercise might have led to the deletion of voter names.

Despite the ECI’s enquiries and reassurances, there is a fairly widespread impression that the attempted linking of electoral roll data with Aadhaar may have resulted in the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters. It has also been suggested that some of these deletions are systematic bids to deprive specific groups of their voting rights.

Not everyone whose name was deleted due to infirmities in the Aadhaar ecosystem – which are by now well-known – will or can approach the ECI for re-enrolment. Given that deprived sections of society are usually the worst hit by such exclusion, many won’t have the wherewithal to do so.

There have also been reports that the ECI has been cagey about revealing information on the linking process and what transpired between the rollout in March 2015 and the Supreme Court ban in August the same year. In response to RTI applications, it cited “non-availability of information in ‘physical form’ in the ‘records of the Commission’”. This kind of deflectionary legalese does not inspire trust and credibility.

Despite all the rhetoric, the ECI’s plans “to implement advanced mechanisms such as electronic and internet-based voting”, remain a flight of fancy. There are those who continue to express doubts over Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines.

While there has been a lot of talk about “giving ‘remote’ voting rights to domestic migrants” particularly in the wake of the humongous migrants’ crisis in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown, the ECI and the government have paid scant attention to migrants within India — let’s call them MRIs, Migrant Resident Indians — whereas they seem to bending over backwards to accommodate the wishes of the well-heeled NRIs.

In addition, the proposed linkage has serious legal and constitutional issues. It will violate the judgment of the Supreme Court of India in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (retd.) & Anr. v. Union Of India, popularly called the Aadhaar judgment.

The problems faced by lay people in trying to use Aadhaar are widely known. Fingerprints and even the iris not matching are widespread. Also, the assumption that linking the Aadhaar database with the voter ID/EPIC database will enhance the authenticity of the voter ID data, is on extremely slippery ground given widespread data quality issues in the Aadhaar database. On the contrary, this might even dilute the sanctity of records in the voter ID database. Data quality issues in the Aadhaar database – a result of inadequate enrolment practices and lack of effective correction mechanisms – have been extensively documented. The UIDAI has itself admitted so before various courts, and multiple courts have refused to accept Aadhaar as proof of birth or identification. This actually has the potential of increasing voter fraud.

And finally, one can do no better than quote Justice B.N. Srikrishna (retired), who chaired the expert committee that drafted India’s Personal Data Protection Bill. He described the Election Commission’s request for a law to link electoral rolls with Aadhaar as “the most dangerous situation” on August 24, 2019.

The real reason why the ECI has “approached” the law ministry is to bypass the Supreme Court judgment. This is why “While approving the ECI’s proposal, the Union Law Ministry headed by Ravi Shankar Prasad has categorically asked the ECI to enumerate the measures that the poll watchdog is adopting to safeguard data from being hijacked, intercepted and stolen, as per the report”.

The report goes on to say, “In its reply, the ECI had sent the list of safeguard measures to the Union Law Ministry in December. The ECI mentioned that these measures are for both application and infrastructure levels. The ECI has also mentioned that the Aadhaar ecosystem is not entered into by the electoral roll database.”

Further, to remove any remaining doubts, and thereby letting the cat out of the bag, the ministry clarified, “Responding to the ECI’s letter of request, the Union Law Ministry stated in September that the ECI’s rationale would ‘pass the benchmark test laid down by the Hon Supreme Court for collecting Aadhaar details for purposes other than getting benefits of state-sponsored schemes.’”

It is sad that an apparently legally elected government should resort to such poorly disguised legal subterfuges to circumvent the directions of the highest court in the land. This is a proposal that should be dropped once and for all.

The article was originally published on The Wire.