Over 67 lakh voters have downloaded a digital voter ID, known as the electronic Electoral Photo ID Card (E-EPIC), from the time the document was made available until December 23, 2022, the Election Commission of India (ECI) said on Monday in a Right to Information (RTI) response obtained by The Hindu. Along with e-PAN and e-Aadhaar, the E-EPIC is one of the few generally accepted identity documents that can be downloaded as a legally valid PDF file.
About 9.8 crore voters are currently eligible to download an E-EPIC, the ECI said in its RTI response, that is, 6.8% of voters who are eligible to download an E-EPIC as a PDF document have done so — this is equivalent to less than 1% of all registered voters in India, going by data released by the ECI in past years. As of 2019, 91.2 crore people were registered to vote in India, meaning that the total number of people eligible to download an E-EPIC in the first place is only around 10% of the overall electoral base.
Even though E-EPIC was launched on January 25, 2021, the general availability of the document was indefinitely postponed in spite of the ECI’s initial promise that it would soon be rolled out to more of the general electorate. For much of 2021 and 2022, only voters who had freshly registered in the rolls after November 2020’s Summary Special Revision were eligible.
At some point in 2022 though, the ECI began to allow any voter to download an E-EPIC version of their Voter ID, as long as they had a unique mobile number registered on the rolls. The ECI did not respond to an RTI query on when exactly the change in eligibility was implemented. In spite of expanded eligibility (1.78 crore voters were eligible as of March 2022), the document has not seen a proportional increase in interest from the public. According to a report by the news portal Entrackr in March 2022, 41 lakh voters had already downloaded an e-EPIC by that time.
Most voters do not have a unique mobile number registered on the voter rolls, the RTI response suggests. However, voters can add their mobile numbers to the rolls through the National Voters’ Service Portal website and the Voter Helpline app, and once an application to do so is approved, they become eligible to download their e-EPIC.
The ECI has been working to link voters’ registrations to their Aadhaar, following the passage of the Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021. More recently, the ECI has announced that it has developed remote Electronic Voter Machine technology to allow migrant voters to exercise their franchise remotely.
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