A nightmare within the making

If the Elector’s Photograph Identification Card (EPIC) is certainly ‘distinctive’, why is the Election Fee of India (ECI) pushing to hyperlink this with one other ‘distinctive’ quantity? Each EPIC and Aadhaar have been mired in controversies and each are identified to have been duplicated. The Distinctive Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) itself admits to having deleted thousands and thousands of duplicate Aadhaar numbers.

The renewed push to hyperlink voter IDs with Aadhaar — a 10-year-old venture of the ECI — and combine the 2 knowledge units and biometric particulars has understandably been met with excessive scepticism. Vikram Hegde, a Supreme Court docket advocate, posted on X, “I don’t know why a foul thought will get such widespread help. Linking Aadhaar to Voter ID has two large issues: a) Not all Aadhaar bearers are residents; b) Not all residents have Aadhaar.”

Know-how author Anupam Saraph can also be sceptical. Aadhaar, he factors out, is a certificates of residence, not a proof of citizenship. Aadhaar numbers could be switched off by the UIDAI with out assigning any motive; by its personal admission, it switched off 8.5 million issued numbers till 2016. Aadhaar has by no means been audited and even real voters can discover their numbers deleted from the database. Causes won’t ever be assigned and the UIDAI can declare that your biometric particulars failed or you should redo the biometrics.

One other expertise author and activist Srinivas Kodali, writing in The Hindu, argues that linking voter IDs with Aadhaar could allow political events to micro-target voters who they know is not going to vote for them. “The belief is that solely the ECI will do the deletion,” he wrote, “…however the knowledge [has] gone past the ECI to political events. The ECI can declare they aren’t sharing it, however political events are gathering voter knowledge on the bottom or taking it from authorities officers. Microtargeting by Aadhaar and telephone numbers is the problem.”

The Supreme Court docket too dominated in opposition to such linkage and has repeatedly cautioned that any such try should strictly stay ‘voluntary’. On 19 March, the Indian Categorical reported that the Union regulation ministry will now amend Type 6B, beneath which offering Aadhaar particulars will nonetheless be ‘elective’ on the face of it, however voters who don’t share the small print should now clarify their causes.

Flagging the dangers related to linking Aadhaar to voter identities, the Web Freedom Basis (IFF) has raised a number of important considerations:

Disenfranchisement threat: IFF emphasises that linking Aadhaar to voter IDs might result in mass disenfranchisement, significantly affecting marginalised communities. Previous initiatives, such because the Nationwide Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP), resulted in thousands and thousands dropping their voting rights resulting from administrative errors associated to Aadhaar verification.

Knowledge safety considerations: Knowledge breaches can result in unauthorised entry, compromising voter privateness and safety, resulting in manipulation of electoral processes.

Biometric failures: Aadhaar’s biometric authentication has a failure fee of round 12 per cent, says the IFF, declaring that such failures will stop eligible voters from casting their ballots.

Focused manipulation: There are fears that linking these databases might result in focused political messaging primarily based on demographic knowledge, and different types of manipulation of the voters throughout ballot campaigns.

The ECI’s push to hyperlink voter ID playing cards with Aadhaar just isn’t new, although. It had begun inside a 12 months of Narendra Modi taking on the reins of presidency — on 3 March 2015, to be exact, when the ECI launched the NERPAP. The then chief election commissioner H.S. Brahma stated the train was elective, that the aim was to weed out bogus voters and that each single linkage was with the consent of the voter involved.

The initiative was halted when the Supreme Court docket flagged considerations in a landmark judgement of 2018, upholding residents’ proper to privateness as a basic proper. It dominated that people can’t be denied providers or prevented from voting for failing to offer their Aadhaar quantity. This successfully meant that whereas Aadhaar might be used for identification, it couldn’t be made necessary for voter registration or voting.

The court docket additionally emphasised that linking Aadhaar to voter IDs might result in disenfranchisement. Nonetheless, by the point this judgement got here, the Aadhaar numbers of 320 million voters had already been seeded within the voter database. It’s germane to keep in mind that forward of the 2018 Karnataka meeting elections, a staggering 6.6 million voters discovered they’d misplaced their voting rights. There have been allegations that sure classes of voters had been disproportionately affected.

Based on current media reviews, the ECI has already collected the Aadhaar particulars of over 660 million voters. As soon as once more, it claims the small print have been shared ‘voluntarily’ and that the 2 knowledge units haven’t but been linked. In different phrases, Aadhaar numbers haven’t but been used to weed out duplicate entries within the electoral rolls.

In December 2021, the Lok Sabha handed the Election Legal guidelines (Modification) Invoice looking for to hyperlink voter identities with Aadhaar, once more with the said goal of avoiding voter duplication within the electoral rolls. At each level, the federal government and the ECI have maintained that the sharing of Aadhaar numbers is ‘voluntary’, however the scenario on the bottom is vastly totally different, with polling personnel and even returning officers typically turning away voters on the pretext that their voter IDs aren’t linked to Aadhaar. “‘Voluntary’ is successfully necessary,” quips Apar Gupta of the Web Freedom Basis.

Amid ongoing controversies over voter lists, the present Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has renewed the push to hyperlink Aadhaar with voter IDs. In Maharashtra, an unusually excessive variety of voter registrations had been recorded in simply 5 months main as much as the current meeting elections — surpassing whole additions over the earlier 5 years.

In Delhi, a political marketing campaign allegedly led to largescale voter deletions. Irregularities have surfaced in voters’ picture I-cards (EPIC) as effectively, with a number of playing cards discovered to be linked to the identical EPIC quantity. Even the ECI, which now has a well-earned repute for stonewalling criticism, was compelled to subject a clarification that irregularities can be rectified.

Jagdeep Chhokar of the Affiliation for Democratic Reforms (ADR) advised Nationwide Herald that regardless of the Supreme Court docket’s observations, the ECI has continued with efforts to combine Aadhaar with voter lists. In violation of the court docket’s order, the Fee has been sending officers for a door-to-door assortment of Aadhaar numbers, together with his personal residence, he stated.

Cyber regulation professional Pawan Duggal sees this as an try and additional broaden the already gigantic Aadhaar ecosystem. The structure of Aadhaar and voter lists are basically totally different, he says, and integrating them might create nice challenges, given particularly Aadhaar’s safety vulnerabilities. He warns that Aadhaar knowledge is available on the darkish internet, and India lacks robust cybersecurity legal guidelines to guard it. Including the EPIC quantity to this interconnected internet of delicate knowledge raises severe considerations about privateness and safety, he says.

Cybersecurity consultants have lengthy warned that consolidating a number of private identifiers right into a single database will increase the danger of largescale knowledge breaches. If Aadhaar-linked voter information are compromised, hackers might probably entry an unlimited trove of non-public data, together with monetary particulars, cell information and voting historical past. This might pave the best way for not simply identification theft and monetary fraud, but in addition focused disinformation campaigns, political profiling and different types of voter manipulation.

Chhokar believes the ECI just isn’t appearing autonomously in persisting with the venture to hyperlink Aadhaar with voter IDs; he sees it as one other step in direction of the nightmare of ‘One Nation, One Election’.