NEW DELHI: Amid a controversy over voter lists, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar has called a high-level meeting on Tuesday to discuss the linking of the voter identity card with the Aadhaar card.
According to sources, the CEC will discuss the matter with Home Secretary Govind Mohan, Legislative Department Secretary Rajiv Mani and UIDAI CEO Bhuvnesh Kumar on March 18.
This is at variance with the EC’s earlier position. In September 2023, the EC told the Supreme Court that the submission of Aadhaar number is not mandatory under Rule 26-B of the Registration of Electors (Amendment) Rules 2022.
The EC further said that it is not mandatory to provide Aadhaar numbers for linking with the electoral roll, and it is considering issuing ‘appropriate clarificatory changes’ in enrolment forms to reflect this.
In 2022, the then Union law minister Kiren Rijiju told the Lok Sabha that linking Aadhaar with the Voter ID is voluntary, adding electors without an Aadhaar number could ‘provide other optional documents as provided in the Form 6B’.
According to him, the Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021, allows Electoral Registration Officers to require the voter to provide their Aadhaar number for identification. However, this is voluntary, he said.
The Tuesday meeting comes amid allegations of voter ID number duplication and fudging of electoral roll data levelled by the Opposition, including the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress.
Several other opposition parties have also demanded a discussion on the EPIC number duplication.
Trinamool MP Sagarika Ghose on Saturday said the statements by the poll panel earlier over the duplicate EPIC numbers and this meeting being called now, are “face-saving measures”. She added that the TMC will keep a strict vigil till the next state elections.
“First, three statements. Now this meeting. This is just a face-saving measure. We will keep a hawk-eye vigil till the elections,” Ghose said.
EC stance
On March 2, EC said identical EPIC numbers or series were allotted to some electors from different states and UTs due to a “decentralised and manual mechanism” before shifting of the electoral roll database of all states to ERONET platform.
In another statement, the EC said that since the allotment of the EPIC series in 2000, some Electoral Registration Officers did not use the correct series
Allotment of duplicate numbers due to incorrect series could not have been detected as the states/UTs were independently managing the electoral roll databases, EC said