The concerns with linking Aadhaar with Voter IDs

Activists have flagged issues of possible disenfranchisement and privacy with Aadhaar linking to voter IDs

Photo used for representation purpose only. File | Photo Credit: B. Jothi Ramalingam

Around 60% of India’s electors now have their Aadhaar number linked to their name on the voter rolls. Activists have raised concerns on disenfranchisement, coercion and privacy as a result of the exercise, which has achieved saturation of over 90% in States like Tripura, which went to the polls recently, while lagging behind in Gujarat and Delhi, where only around 30% of the electorate has provided an Aadhaar number to election officials. 

The linking is being carried out by filling Form 6B, which is provided by election officials going door-to-door to collect Aadhaar or alternate ID from registered voters. The form was the result of the Election Laws (Amendment) Act passed in 2021 to allow the linking of Voter IDs and Aadhaar. While the Election Commission (EC) maintains that providing an Aadhaar is optional, Form 6B requires voters to declare that they do not have an Aadhaar to avoid providing the number.

The allure of Aadhaar for election authorities is clear: while the EC itself doesn’t have access to the biometrics on the basis of which Aadhaar numbers are issued, the unique identifier issued to each Indian resident allows authorities to flag voters who are registered to vote elsewhere, or registered in multiple places. The EC does not authenticate the Aadhaar numbers it collects by way of biometrics or one-time passcodes sent by SMS.

The Supreme Court had, before the Election Laws (Amendment) Act’s passage, restricted the mandatory use of Aadhaar to welfare schemes and PAN linking. Form 6B accepts other proofs of identity if a voter doesn’t have Aadhaar, but it is unclear if this approach has any deduplicating benefits.

As the Aadhaar-Voter ID linking exercise progressed, some voters said election authorities told them that not providing Aadhaar would lead to their name getting deleted from rolls. The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Delhi later clarified following one such instance that the linking was voluntary, and that enquiries would be made.

The Hindu reached out to all CEOs of India’s 36 States and Union Territories. Mizoram Joint-CEO David L. Pachuau said that voters were informed linking is “voluntary” and “not compulsory”. Liken Koyu, the Joint-CEO for Arunachal Pradesh, also said voters were not being told in the State that linking was mandatory to stay on the rolls. Karnataka’s CEO Manoj Kumar Meena reiterated these points, and added that deduplication of registrations on the basis of Aadhaar numbers collected had not started. Other CEOs did not respond to written queries.

EC officials reportedly said in December 2022 that the deduplication process — the natural next step of linking Aadhaar — had not yet started. But an episode from 2019 offers a possible glimpse of mass deletions on the basis of Aadhaar. 

That year, activists from the NGO Swecha said that documents they had obtained through Right to Information (RTI) requests had revealed that over 20 lakh voters were deleted from the rolls in Telangana following an Aadhaar-linking exercise, then run on a pilot program called the National Electoral Roll and Purification Program (NERPAP). The CEO for Telangana at the time admitted that door-to-door verification was not done for all these deletions. The CEO who followed maintained that the majority of the voters were deleted legitimately, citing a low number of voters who re-enrolled. 

Privacy issues also emerge from this exercise. “Researchers warn that political microtargeting could result in a loss of privacy and exposure to selective information, providing fertile ground for mis- and dis-information to spread and polarization to increase,” Dr. Patrick Jones, a scholar of emerging media and digital technologies, wrote for the Brookings Institution in April 2022, pointing to research from the University of Amsterdam. 

While election officials aren’t currently requiring the names on voter IDs to match those on Aadhaar, deduplication could improve the quality of constituency-wise voter information available to political parties. The Aadhaar numbers themselves, a training video from the Tamil Nadu CEO insists, are secured behind a “double lock” after digitisation when collected from paper forms.

Pointing to an unusual surge in requests for voter deletions from Shivajinagar in Bengaluru last year, Srinivas Kodali, a technology activist, said that Aadhaar linking may enable political parties to micro-target voters who they know will not vote for them. “The assumption is that only the ECI will do the deletion,” Mr. Kodali said. But “the data has gone beyond the ECI to political parties. ECI can claim they’re not sharing it, but political parties are collecting voter data on the ground or taking it from government officials. Microtargeting through Aadhaar and phone numbers is the issue.”

The Supreme Court in October 2022 issued notice to the government on a challenge to the linking exercise, with a Divisional Bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Abhay S. Oka noting that “there is possibility that in certain tribal areas even the alternative documents [if a voter does not produce Aadhaar] may not be available”.