India’s Election Commission is pushing an initiative aimed at linking voter ID cards (EPICs, electoral photo identity cards) with the country’s digital biometric ID system.
The system, Aadhaar, in turn, links residents’ fingerprints and iris scans to a unique 12-digit ID number.
A meeting was been scheduled for this week that was expected to discuss how to speed up the process and deal with any road bumps along the way. For now, the plan is for the process of linking EPICs with Aadhaar to remain voluntary – and this is thanks to a Supreme Court ruling.
The Election Commission is basing the effort on India’s Election Laws Act, the version amended in 2021, which allows officials to ask voters for their Aadhaar ID number in order to verify identity.
Meanwhile, according to announcements earlier in the week, the meeting would bring together the Commission’s chief, Gyanesh Kumar, and officials from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs as well as those from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
This last participant is credited for successful work on “biometric deduplication” (of voter registration, through Aadhaar authentication using facial recognition.)
Not everyone is happy with these developments – several opposition parties have spoken about the possibility of manipulating voter lists by abusing the incoming system, as well as through duplication of EPIC numbers. The Commission did not deny this last point, but said it would solve the problem “within three months.”
However, its representatives claim that duplicated voter ID card numbers “do not necessarily indicate fraudulent registration.”
And the justification for this latest initiative of linking EPICs with Aadhaar is that it will improve “election integrity” – specifically around voter rolls.
The initiative comes on the heels of the rollout of the electronic version of electoral photo identity cards – e-EPICs. The overall direction of all these moves is to further cement the role of digital ID in both India’s government services and the private sector.
Another recent development aimed toward the same goal is the announced launch in 2025 of an updated Central KYC (“know-your-customer”) Registry (CKYCR). Before this, the country’s postal service incorporated eKYC, based on Aadhaar, for savings accounts.
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