AADHAR VOTER ID LINKAGE

1. Why in News?

• Reports have surfaced online of instances where block-level officers have asked individuals to link their Aadhaar with their Voter IDs, failing which their Voter IDs could be cancelled. This comes in the aftermath of the Election Commission’s (EC) campaign to promote the linkage of Voter ID and Aadhaar

2. Background

• Aadhaar, India’s program to provide a unique identification number for every resident, is the largest biometric identification program in the world.
• The program also aims to achieve social inclusion and more efficient public and private service delivery. 
• Aadhaar has also started to be used for several public purposes, such as digitizing government subsidy flows (G2P [government-to-person] payments); financial services; recording attendance for government employees to reduce absenteeism; and issuance of passports, voter identity cards, and other forms of ID.

3. Contemporary scenario

• Recently, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced that the Ministry of Law & Justice, is considering the integration of Aadhaar and Voter ID information. 
• The idea is to remove errors from electoral rolls and to allow migrant workers to vote in elections away from their homes. 
• It claims that such a unified database will eliminate duplication of entries between Aadhaar and ECI
• The exact reasons for this proposed integration are still unclear, and the justifications given by the government are ambiguous, from removing duplicates from the electoral roll to letting migrants vote, without any robust policy proposal mentioned.

4. About Election Laws (Amendment) Bill,2021

5. Operational Difficulties of the linkage

• Aadhaar is only a proof of residence and not a proof of citizenship. Therefore, verifying voter identity against this will only help in tackling duplication but will not restrain voters who aren't citizens of India from voting.
• Aadhaar based biometric authentication had a 12% error rate. This led the Supreme Court to hold in Puttaswamy that a person would not be denied benefits in the case of Aadhaar-based authentication. This concern is also reflected in the previous experiences of using Aadhaar to clean electoral rolls. 
• A similar exercise undertaken in 2015 in Andhra and Telangana led to the disenfranchisement of around 30 lakh voters before the Supreme Court stalled the process of linkage.
• Civil society has highlighted that linking of the two databases of electoral rolls and Aadhaar could lead to the linkage of Aadhaar’s “demographic” information with voter ID information, and lead to violation of the right to privacy and surveillance measures by the state. 

6. Other Concerns

6.1.Legal and Privacy Concerns

• The proposal fails to specify the extent of data sharing between the two databases. As the integration of two databases can result in targeted political advertising, and also disenfranchisement. 
• There have been examples of targeted surveillance using Aadhaar information and demographic data. In Andhra Pradesh, 5.167 million families’ locations could be tracked on a website run by the state government, using religion and caste as search criteria which can easily result in caste and religion-based politics

6.2. Ethical dimension regarding the usability of the data

• The prominent data in the wrong hands could be used to target specific groups and strip many of the right to vote

6.3.Scope of Fraud

• The scope for electoral fraud is widespread, not reduced by linking the EPIC database with the unverifiable UIDAI database. UIDAI in multiple court cases has admitted that it has no information about the enrolment operator, agency, or even their location while enrolling someone in Aadhaar, raising questions about dubious enrolment practices.

6.4.The cyber safety of the data

• Aadhaar is prone to leaks and therefore can undermine the sanctity of the electoral roll as UIDAI and MEITY, for the first time admitted to false Aadhaar cards and cyber security being a problem in a written answer to Parliament during the 2020 monsoon session.

6.5.Political lobbying and threat by ruling party to donate to election fund

• EPIC cards issued using an unverifiable Aadhaar card could result in massive fraud, rather than securing the integrity of the electoral roll. The scope for abuse by political groups is extremely high if the linkage proposed between EPIC and Aadhaar matches the PAN-Aadhaar integration.

7. Opinion of International Institutions

• Reports by the World Bank and European Union on integrating social and electoral registries have argued strongly against such integration because of the scope for abuse and the complications in verifying data. 
• The evidence shows that an integrated ID card will disenfranchise voters due to a lack of documentation, undermining the very purpose of this integration. 
• In an attempt to clean up electoral rolls, this exercise has the potential to disenfranchise existing voters. 

8. Need of the Hour

• If India passes a Personal Data Protection Bill and decides to press ahead with voter integration, it might be worth examining South Korea’s data protection and voting regime since it mandates data minimisation.as South Korea has enabled limited forms of e-voting and other e-governance frameworks while ensuring strong data protection laws to facilitate this push.
• Moreover, for a government agency to share data across the government, the explicit consent of the individual in question must be obtained, and even then, the principle of data minimisation is to be followed.
• Sharing of limited demographic information is shared across the ECI and UIDAI to ensure that the privacy of voters is maintained, if the Personal Data Protection Bill has such limiting provisions

9. Conclusion

• In 2019, Justice B.N. Srikrishna, Chairman of the Committee that drafted the Personal Data Protection Bill, called the ECI’s proposal to link the two databases “most dangerous,” arguing that “if [the government] can collate the data, [it] can profile human beings.” this note has already explained the ease with which governments can profile their citizens, as seen in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, without robust legal hurdles to prevent the misuse and abuse of personal data. 
• In this note, we have examined the implications of the potential integration of Aadhaar and Election Cards. 
• On balance, we argue against this move, in its proposed form. 
• While we acknowledge that the move seems likely, given the government’s desire to push forward with this proposal and its majorities in Parliament, the exercise raises serious questions about the privacy of voters, and by extension, the sanctity of the electoral roll, undermining the very justification for the integration. On balance, the proposed amendment in its current form does not address the right to privacy that is guaranteed to individual citizens and does not address the technological mechanism through which integration would take place. 
• Data minimisation with electronic signatures might be a way to ensure that individual data is not abused by the government, but given previous attempts at integrating social registries with Aadhaar, it seems unlikely. 
• Given the lack of clarity on the mechanism of this proposed integration, we would recommend that UIDAI and the ECI reconsider this proposal until clear safeguards to protect individual privacy are made clear, until the databases are further secured to prevent potential leaks, and processes and mechanisms to prevent disenfranchisement of voters during this exercise are developed.