The Election Commission on Thursday clarified that there is no category of “suspicious voters” under the 1951 Representation of the People Act.

The poll panel’s statement was conveyed to the Rajya Sabha through a written reply by Minister of State for Law and Justice Arjun Ram Meghwal amid the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar.

Meghwal was responding to a question from Samajwadi Party MP Ramji Lal Suman, who sought to know whether such voters had participated in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

The clarification comes even as the poll body is reviewing voter rolls in Bihar, with one of the reasons it had cited being the alleged inclusion of foreign illegal immigrants over time.

In response to a separate question from Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Kumar Jha, Meghwal also said that the process of linking Aadhaar cards with the Election Photo Identity Cards has not yet begun.

He added that following a 2021 amendment to the Representation of the People Act, the poll body began collecting Aadhaar details from voters on a voluntary basis starting August 1, 2022.

The clarification comes four months after the Election Commission announced plans to start the process to link voter ID cards with the Aadhaar database.

In a press note on March 18, the electoral body had said that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had discussed the matter with senior officials from the Union Home Ministry, Legislative Department and Unique Identification Authority of India.

The Election Commission had clarified that under Article 326 of the Constitution, only Indian citizens are eligible to vote, while the Aadhaar card serves only as proof of identity, not citizenship.

The decision came weeks after the Trinamool Congress and the Congress alleged that at least 129 voters in Haryana and West Bengal had the same 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.

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