The law ministry is learnt to have conveyed to the Election Commission of India on Tuesday to make the required legal amendments to ensure linkage of Aadhaar with the voter ID. According to the government, the linkage of Aadhaar with voter ID will remove bogus entries, clean up electoral rolls and give remote voting rights.
Chief election commissioner Sunil Arora and the two election commissioners, Ashok Lavasa and Sunil Chandra, met legislative affairs secretary G Narayan Raju and additional secretary Rita Vashishth to discuss pending electoral reforms. During the meeting that was held on Tuesday, the law ministry conveyed to the Election Commission that the Centre is preparing to make the required legal amendment to the Aadhaar Act. The amendment will legally empower the Election Commission to link Aadhaar with a voter identity card. The government is likely to take the linkage issue to Cabinet for approval soon as it will require an amendment to the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
The linkage is considered crucial to the EC’s larger objective of ridding the electoral roll of all discrepancies. It is also important to the poll panel’s plan to allow domestic migrant workers to vote from anywhere in the country. The panel is considering various technologies, including blockchain, for the same.
CEC Arora also sought to point out at the meeting that there are more than 40 different proposals of electoral reforms pending since long. The CEC said at the meeting, “Commission would like to have such meetings with the legislative department at regular intervals to pursue all such pending proposals.”
The secretary is learnt to have assured the poll panel that several of the proposed reforms are already being examined by the ministry for implementation.
The other issues discussed at the meeting included offering multiple registration opportunities in a year to first-time voters and substituting the term ‘wife’ by ‘spouse’ in the RP Act to facilitate electoral registration of the spouse of women service officials. The issue of paid news and making false affidavit an electoral offence was also taken up at the meeting. Covering print media and social media intermediaries under Section 126 of the RP Act and amendments in contribution form were also discussed.
The EC also held a two-day long conference with its nine working groups and over 20 chief electoral officers to deliberate on the learnings from the general and other elections held recently.
The demand for linkage of Aadhaar with voter ID has been around since 2015. The EC had in 2015 taken up the matter as part of its National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme. Around 32 crore Aadhaar numbers were seeded, but the plan was put on hold after Supreme Court judgment on restricting the use of Aadhaar.
