Why experts are sceptical about the benefits of linking voter IDs with Aadhaar

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,”...

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