The Election Commission of India has started the process to link voter ID cards with the Aadhaar database – a decade after the Supreme Court paused such an exercise.
The commission’s decision to go ahead with the linking came weeks after the Trinamool Congress and the Congress alleged that at least 129 voters in Haryana and West Bengal had the same Election Photo Identity Card or EPIC number, which, according to the commission, is supposed to be unique for every voter.
The Congress had called it a “deliberate act of voter list manipulation” to aid the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Media reports said that the commission was moving ahead with the Aadhaar-voter ID card linkage in order to remove duplicate voter IDs, though the Election Commission official press release did not state the objective of the exercise.
While former bureaucrats told Scroll that the move could solve the problem of duplicate voter ID cards, experts and activists in the technology and policy space were sceptical.
Alok Prasanna Kumar, co-founder of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, argued that the problem flagged by Opposition parties – two voters having the same EPIC number – should have been corrected at the administrative level. “Linking Aadhaar with EPIC is a red herring that has been done for an easy fix,” he said.
Kumar pointed out that the voter ID or EPIC is only a tool of identification and not a guarantee that one has the right to vote. A voter can vote at a polling station without an EPIC, since Election Commission guidelines allow the use of one out of 12 IDs, like a passport, a pension document, an income tax PAN card, or even an Aadhaar.
“What allows you to vote is your name on the electoral roll,” said Kumar. “We need a robust way of checking whether we have a healthy electoral roll.”
Other experts argued that, at best, the move is a “pointless” exercise that will do little to clean up electoral rolls, and at worst, a “dangerous” move that could affect the right to vote of millions of Indians.
They also pointed out that the exercise could make it impossible for voters to refuse linking their voter ID card to the Aadhaar database, making the biometrically linked identity project voluntary only in name but mandatory in effect.
A compulsory linkage?
A nationwide programme to link voter IDs and Aadhaar was first launched in 2015, when the Election Commission announced the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme, or NERPAP, to create a “totally error free, and authenticated electoral roll”.
The exercise was suspended in August that year following a Supreme Court order which ruled that Aadhaar could not be used for anything except receiving benefits through the public distribution system. By then, 31 crore voter IDs across the country had been linked to Aadhaar.
After the pause in 2015, the Election Commission resumed collecting Aadhaar data in 2021.
This happened because in 2018, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar Act and greenlit the Aadhar-EPIC link on the condition that it passed a three-pronged test: it needs a legal basis, the state must mention the aim of the exercise and it must be proportional.
Accordingly, in 2021, the Modi government amended the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The amendment provided for linkage but without making it mandatory. Significantly, it inserted a provision that names in the electoral roll shall not be deleted merely because an individual is unable to furnish their Aadhaar number.
But the newest proposals could roll back those provisions.
On March 26, the Indian Express reported, citing unidentified officials, that the Election Commission has proposed that any voter who declines to share their Aadhaar number with the poll body for this exercise may have to make an appearance before an electoral registration officer, or ERO, to explain why she was not furnishing the information.
“If the news report is true, this is an indirect way of making it mandatory to link EPIC and Aadhaar,” said R Rangarajan, a former IAS officer.
It would make it inevitable that voters comply, Rangarajan said.
“Who will make the effort of going to the ERO to show cause?” he said. “Most people will simply share their Aadhaar information. The better option will be EC obtaining a favourable order from the courts for mandatory linkage by arguing that it passes the test of proportionality.”
Kumar, of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, said that the Election Commission needs to answer a few questions about this proposal. First, what is just cause for refusing to link Aadhaar with voter ID? Second, what is the consequence of not having just cause – for instance, can a voter be removed from the roll?
“Sans these details, I think this proposal is a non-starter,” said Kumar. “It may also be seen as an attempt to intimidate a voter into linking Aadhaar. Sending a show cause sounds like the voter has done something wrong and has to justify themselves. This is a perversion of the notion of rule of law.”
The Telangana warning
The 2015 exercise to link Aadhaar cards to voter IDs had grim consequences for the voters of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
In December 2018, on the day of the Assembly election in Telangana, lakhs of voters found their names missing from the electoral rolls. The Opposition claimed as many as 27 lakh names had been struck off.
In 2019, information obtained under the Right to Information Act found that 55 lakh voters had been deleted from electoral rolls in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana after the exercise to link Aadhaar and voter ID cards.
A Huffpost investigation found that one reason for these deletions was a software that scanned the state’s EPIC database and the Aadhaar database to try and match a voter’s EPIC information with their Aadhaar information.
An algorithm then rated this match. If the rating was low, Election Commission officials conducted door-to-door verification to double-check the match. If they could not meet a voter after three visits, the voter's name was struck off the roll.
This did not work out as smoothly as it sounds. Election officials admitted that in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation area – which then had 25 of Telangana’s 119 assembly seats – voters were removed without door-to-door verification.
“Voter removal always happens when this exercise takes place,” said Srinivas Kodali, a civic hacker and independent researcher who was part of the RTI campaign in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh mentioned above. “The question is: will Aadhaar make or break elections in India? I think it’ll be the latter.”
The electoral roll
Since 2015, the Election Commission has collected the Aadhaar data of 66.23 crore voters, out of a total of 96.88 crore.
Among these nearly 97 crore voters, duplication can happen in two ways: one, as the Opposition has pointed out, is that two voters can have the same EPIC numbers.
Rangarajan, the former IAS officer, said that the linkage will remove duplications in the electoral roll. “But it will not prevent random and arbitrary additions and deletions in the roll,” he added.
Last year, Scroll had reported how dozens of Muslim voters in Mathura could not vote in the Lok Sabha elections because their names were not on the electoral roll, despite having EPICs, Aadhaar cards and voter slips.
Similarly, in December 2024, booth-level officers – who are part-time officials of the Election Commission – in Farrukhabad parliamentary constituency in Uttar Pradesh reportedly told Newslaundry that they removed predominantly Muslim, Yadav, Shakya and Jatav voters from the electoral roll under pressure from a local BJP legislator.
The multiple EPICs problem
The second form of duplication is one voter having multiple EPICs, which is considered a criminal offence.
Though the Election Commission has no data on how many voters have more than one EPIC, it is likely that this form of duplication is more widespread than the first one. Voters who shift from one place to the another, like migrant workers, usually end up with EPICs in both locations and inflate the electoral rolls.
This is a tricky problem to solve because if, say, the Election Commission detects that a voter has two photo identity cards, one in Delhi and another in Uttar Pradesh, which of the two will be considered a duplication and removed?
“The ECI can spot such duplicacy by linking EPIC with Aadhaar, but it will need to develop an acceptable mechanism for reaching out to voters with multiple EPICs to ensure no citizen loses out on the right to vote while carrying out this process,” said Rangarajan.
Former chief election commissioner SY Quraishi told Scroll that in such cases, “any deletions cannot be done unilaterally”. He added: “The EC will have to serve a notice and ask voters to explain why their names should not be removed from the electoral roll.”
But Rangarajan pointed out, any voter with multiple voter ID cards who cannot read or write or communicate properly with the Election Commission can risk losing all her EPICs.
Privacy concerns
Another set of concerns come from the Aadhaar side of the linkage. Nikhil Pahwa, a digital rights activist and founder of MediaNama, said that Aadhaar is neither a proof of citizenship nor a proof of identity: Aadhaar cards have reportedly been made with fake IDs and its database has been sold for Rs 500 on WhatsApp groups, he pointed out.
“The UIDAI [the Unique Identification Authority of India, which manages the Aadhaar database] has no mechanisms to prove how many fakes there are in the system,” said Pahwa. “Given all this, how is linking Aadhaar with the EPIC number going to help ensure that only citizens vote? This is yet another pointless exercise that will be forced upon citizens and that courts probably will do nothing about.”
Jyoti Panday, regional director at the Internet Governance Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Scroll that the Election Commission’s move is in line with the Indian government’s efforts to create a comprehensive data economy.
“Digital identities like Aadhaar are used for transactions, like benefits of public sector schemes,” Panday said. “If something goes wrong there, people lose out on these benefits. Now digital identities will be used to access one’s right to vote. If anything goes wrong here, one can lose a fundamental right.”
In its effort to solve one problem, the Election Commission could end up creating many more, Panday added.
Kodali listed just one such constitutional problem.
The Election Commission has a decentralised process to manage electoral rolls – it empowers electoral registration officers, or EROs, to prepare and update the rolls for every assembly constituency, including adding and deleting names.
Kodali said this process could now become more centralised since to detect duplicates across states, the poll body might have to analyse voter data at the central level. “Power will move away from the ERO to the headquarters of the Election Commission of India, to the chief election commissioner, who according to the Supreme Court has no role to play in the preparation of the electoral rolls at the constituency level,” he said. “That is the preserve of the ERO.”
Political consultants jubilant
If the Election Commission’s move to marry the EPIC database with the Aadhaar database has found some support, it is in the political consultancy sector.
A consultant, who has been in the profession for nearly a decade, told Scroll that the Aadhaar linkage could mean better data to profile voters for electoral campaigns.
“EPIC data is easily available but in several cases, it only gives the first name of a voter,” said the consultant. “But Aadhaar is harder to access and it gives one the voter’s surname too.”
This would mean better data on voters’ caste. “If I have access to Aadhar data, sooner or later I would have PAN data too, since they are linked,” said the consultant. “That means more data on someone’s income bracket and socio-economic status
Amogh Dhar Sharma, a researcher at the University of Oxford and the author of The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, told Scroll that political parties often trust consultants more than their own workers because of the belief that they have the “right data”, which is often harvested from dubious channels.
“A particularly notorious example is when ruling parties in a state gain access to beneficiary data from welfare schemes being run by the incumbent government and repurpose it to micro-target voters during campaigns,” said Dhar.
Dhar added that with weak data protection safeguards, the Election Commission’s decision to link EPIC and Aadhaar “becomes especially troubling, raising urgent questions about the blurred boundaries between governance, surveillance, and electoral strategy.”
