The Election Commission has once again proposed to link the Electoral Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) with the 12-digit Aadhaar numbers of the respective voters, Law Minister Kiren Rijiju informed the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.
Rijiju stated in response to a question in the Lok Sabha that the EC proposed to link the electoral rolls with the Aadhaar ecosystem in order to curb the menace of multiple enrolment by the same person as voter at different places.
He said that proposal was under consideration by the Government.
In 2015, the EC had launched the National Electoral Law Purification and Authentication Programme to link Aadhaar numbers with the EPICs. But the programme had to be suspended after the Supreme Court on August 11, 2015 ordered that the use of Aadhaar would be optional for availing various welfare schemes of the government and no personal information of the holders of such cards should be shared by any authority.
The EC in August 2019 proposed that the government should amend the election laws to empower Electoral Registration Officers to seek Aadhaar numbers of the existing and the new voters. The Ministry of Law and Justice in early 2020 started working on the proposal for amending the electoral laws as proposed by the poll-panel.
The Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra a few weeks back wrote to the then Minister of Law and Justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad, requesting expedited action on the electoral reforms proposed by it, including linking the voter identity cards with the Aadhaar.
Prasad’s successor Rijiju informed the Lok Sabha on Wednesday that the issue of electoral reforms in its entirety had been examined by the Law Commission in the recent past and, after consulting various stakeholders, the commission submitted its 244th and 255th Reports covering various proposed electoral reforms, which included disqualification from contesting election on framing of charges, regulation of election finance and opinion polls and ban on paid news.