Voter ID-Aadhaar linking is an outright assault on free and fair elections and the right to vote

It violates Election Commission’s 2023 promise in court, and is yet another coercive enrolment scheme.

The right to vote lies at the heart of democracy. Yet, the Election Commission of India’s proposal seeks to erode this right by forcing voters who decline Aadhaar linkage with their Electoral ID cards to justify their decision in person before the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO). This coercive and unconstitutional requirement creates needless bureaucratic obstacles, pressuring citizens into Aadhaar-EPIC linkage and undermining their lawful choice to withhold Aadhaar. It is a blatant violation of the Election Commission’s commitment before the Supreme Court in G. Niranjan vs. Election Commission of India (2023) that Aadhaar linkage will be entirely voluntary. No citizen should have to clear arbitrary administrative hurdles to exercise their electoral rights.

The government’s persistent push to link Aadhaar with voter IDs is legally unsound, unnecessary, and deeply dangerous for electoral integrity. Aadhaar is issued to anyone who has resided in India 182 days or more in the 12 months preceding the date of application and the UIDAI has never verified nationality. Under the Representation of the People Act, 1950, only Indian citizens residing in the country are eligible to vote. Form 6B in its present form already undermines the voluntary nature of Aadhaar-voter ID linkage by forcing voters into a false choice: either provide Aadhaar or falsely claim they don’t have one. Now, those who refuse must appear before the ERO, creating an administrative burden that pressures compliance. Instead of addressing this flaw, the Election Commission’s amendment exacerbates coercion, imposing bureaucratic barriers that make Aadhaar submission effectively mandatory.

Despite its history of mass disenfranchisement, the Election Commission is once again reviving the flawed Aadhaar-voter ID linkage. In the 2018 Telangana elections, over 55 lakh voters were wrongly deleted due to Aadhaar mismatches. A similar attempt under NERPAP in 2015 collapsed under public backlash. Yet, instead of learning from these failures, the Commission is doubling down on the same exclusionary process.

Flawed database

The Aadhaar database is riddled with inaccuracies and vulnerabilities. A 2022 Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report exposed its glaring deficiencies, including duplicate and fraudulent Aadhaar numbers, unreliable biometric authentication, missing residency verification, and severe data integrity failures. Reports estimate that 5% of Aadhaars have errors, which adds up to over 7 crore individuals/residents. The UIDAI itself has admitted to multiple courts that Aadhaar cannot serve as proof of birth or identity. Worse still, linking Aadhaar to voter IDs could facilitate electoral fraud rather than prevent it, given that self-reported errors in Aadhaar cards are 1.5 times higher than in voter IDs. (State of Aadhaar Report (2019) Dalberg, State of Aadhaar Report (2018) IDInsight)  Attempts to use Aadhaar for cleaning-up of other government databases, for instance in PDS or MGNREGA, have led to significant wrongful deletions. (From Aadhaar Mandate to Mass Jobcard Deletions: Unravelling the MGNREGA Story (2023) EPW) How mandatory Aadhaar authentication leads to exclusion of the marginalised from PDS (2024), Frontline) The resulting exclusion of citizens from accessing their entitlements has been extensively documented. 

Tying Aadhaar to voter IDs enables mass surveillance, facilitates political profiling, and threatens voter disenfranchisement, all without the protection of robust data privacy laws. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, remains unimplemented and offers broad exemptions to the government, failing to prevent misuse. The Madras High Court has flagged concerns over Aadhaar data misuse for political gains, as seen in Puducherry, echoing global scandals like Cambridge Analytica, which exposed how voter data can manipulate elections and undermine democracy.

This proposal is an outright assault on free and fair elections. It violates the Supreme Court’s ruling in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2018), which strictly limited Aadhaar’s use to welfare schemes for which resources were drawn from the Consolidated Fund of India. It contravenes fundamental rights to privacy, dignity, and equality, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. India cannot allow its electoral system to be hijacked by unreliable technology and coercive state power.

The Way Forward

Instead of pursuing a reckless and unconstitutional Aadhaar-EPIC linkage, the Election Commission must withdraw the proposal entirely and abandon all attempts to link Aadhaar with voter IDs. 

Additionally, in light of irregularities in the electoral process such as allegations of duplicate voter IDs, the Election Commission must also: 

1. Revise Form 6B to ensure that voters have a genuine, explicit and unambiguous choice to meaningfully opt out of Aadhaar-EPIC linkage, without facing punitive consequences, profiling, or being subjected to bureaucratic inquisition.

2. Strengthen door-to-door verification of voter rolls, which remains the most effective, constitutionally sound, and non-intrusive method for ensuring electoral accuracy.

3. Implement social audits to improve voter roll management, ensuring transparency, public participation, and accountability in electoral roll revisions.

4. Adopt alternative identity verification mechanisms that do not rely on Aadhaar’s flawed biometric database and do not introduce unconstitutional barriers to voting.

5. Ensure robust data protection safeguards before considering any linkage of government databases, with clear prohibitions on voter profiling, surveillance, or commercial exploitation of electoral data.

The right to vote is not a privilege granted by the state. It is a right that must be protected from coercion, surveillance, and exclusion. The Election Commission must uphold its constitutional duty to facilitate free and fair elections, not undermine them. Democracy cannot function when voter rights are placed under bureaucratic siege.

The Election Commission must immediately withdraw this proposal. The integrity of Indian democracy depends on it.

Please sign the statement to call on the Election Commission to withdraw the proposal to link Aadhaar/ UID with Voter IDs and to request the Ministry of Law and Justice and the Government of India to decline any such proposal.