The Election Commission (EC) of India to begin a campaign from today (August 1) to link voter ID cards with Aadhaar cards in several states. Linking of voter ID cards with Aadhaar cards is being done to establish the identity of electors and authentication of entries in the electoral roll and to identify the registration of the name of the same person in more than one constituency or more than once in the same constituency.
“On the instructions of the Election Commission, the process of voluntarily collecting Aadhaar numbers from the voters enrolled in the electoral roll will start from August 1,” Uttar Pradesh CEO Ajay Kumar Shukla said as quoted by ZEE Business.
According to a PTI report, former Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra had stated that linking the unique identification number to voter ID cards would be optional and that voters would need to have a sufficient reason for not linking it.
As per a PTI report citing union minister Kiren Rijiju, the government revised the Registration of Electors Rules earlier in June to permit linking Aadhaar details with a voters list to filter out duplicate entries and make election legislation gender neutral for service voters.
The government earlier in June amended the Registration of Electors Rules to allow linking Aadhaar details with a voters list to weed out duplicate entries and make election law gender neutral for service voters, a PTI report said quoting union minister Kiren Rijiju.
Earlier, the Supreme Court has recently asked Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala, who challenged the Election Law (Amendment) Act, 2021 which enables the linking of electoral roll data with the Aadhaar ecosystem, to approach the competent high court.
A bench of Justices DY Chandrachud and AS Bopanna asked Surjewala’s counsel as to why they have not approached the high court first.
