New electoral reforms - a 'coup' on electoral democracy, claim critics.

The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021 that aims to introduce sweeping electoral reforms including linking Aadhaar with the voter ID card was passed by the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha last week. The Bill includes the following major changes to the Indian electoral system:

• Amendment to Section 23 of the Representation of the People (RP) Act to allow linking of the Voter’s ID card with the Aadhaar card
• Amendment to Section 14 of the RP Act to have four qualifying dates for eligible people to register as voters. Formerly, people who turn 18 on or before January 1 could register as voters. Now, the 1st day of January, the 1st day of April, the 1st day of July, and the 1st day of October will be the qualifying dates for people to register themselves for a Voter’s ID.
• Amendment to Section 20 of the RP Act, 1950 and Section 60 of the RP Act, 1951 allowing the elections to become gender-neutral for service voters. The amendment will replace the word "wife" with the word "spouse", thus allowing the husband of the army service officer to vote as well. Formerly, this facility was available only to the wife of a male service voter and wasn’t available to the husband of a woman service voter.

Minister of Law and Justice Kiren Rijiju said that the legislation will end bogus voting in the country and make the electoral process more credible. Earlier, people who moved residences obtained a new Voter’s ID card each time without getting the old one deleted. This created duplicate entries in the election database. By linking Aadhar with the electoral data (Voter’s ID card), the issue of multiple enrolments of the same person at different places will be solved and ensure a clean electoral database. The government has clarified though that disclosure of Aadhar number while applying for a Voter’s ID card is purely voluntary and confirmed that no application will be rejected due to non-submission of Aadhaar number.

What’s driving the critic’s fury?

Members of both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha opposed the move. The Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha amid din, and through a Voice vote in the Rajya Sabha as the Opposition walked out in protest. Privacy advocates have also slammed the Bill calling it a “coup” against electoral democracy.

Violation of Privacy

Linking Aadhaar with the voter ID would bring demographic information into the electoral database. This would open opportunities for increased surveillance, disenfranchisement based on identity, targeted advertisements, and commercial exploitation of sensitive private data. While individual identification of voting choices may not be possible with the linkage of Aadhaar with voter IDs, it will lead to profiling allowing the government to design targeted schemes based on the data,” said Apar Gupta, Executive Director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. The fear in the minds of critics is not without basis as the catastrophic impact of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2019 that facilitated voter profiling is yet fresh in the public memory.

In addition, the new Data Protection Bill exempts government agencies from legal oversight without sufficient checks and balances. As a result, government agencies such as CBI and ED will have the power to collect and access personal data without consent.

The government’s assurance of “voluntary disclosure” does not invoke much confidence, especially given the manner in which the public was coerced to link their Aadhaar numbers with their bank accounts (also deemed voluntary), in violation of specific stay orders from the Supreme Court. It is only a matter of time, the critics say, that this voluntary act too will become deemed by the government.

Illegal and unconstitutional

Legally, the Aadhar Act does not permit the linking of Aadhaar with the electoral data. Aadhar was meant for facilitating direct delivery of financial and other subsidies to the end-user and eliminating corruption by middlemen, while voting is a legal right which makes the Aadhaar act beyond the legislative competence of the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill.

Linking Aadhar with electoral data is also unconstitutional as it does not meet the test of proportionality laid down by the Supreme Court in its judgment on privacy in the Justice KS Puttaswamy vs Union of India case.

Risk of fraud and disenfranchisement

Though intended to clean up the electoral database, linking Aadhaar would instead dilute its sanctity and increase the likelihood of voter fraud. In 2019, self-reported errors in Aadhaar data were one-and-a-half times higher than errors in the electoral database. The skepticism stems from numerous failed attempts in the past to use Aadhaar to “clean up” databases of other government registries, like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and Public Distribution System (PDS). These attempts resulted in mass disentitlement as thousands of citizens have been arbitrarily deleted from systems without any notice. A study from Jharkhand found that 90% of ration cards canceled as “bogus” during Aadhaar linking between 2016 and 2018 were in fact genuine. The CEO of UIDAI admitted in 2018 that authentication failure for government services was as high as 12% – which translates into millions of affected persons.

A similar attempt was made by the Election Commission for the Telangana Assembly elections in 2018 by linking Aadhaar data with voter identity cards – an act that led to over 20 lakh voters becoming disenfranchised as their names were not found in the voting list.