With the aim of increasing electoral transparency, the process of linking voter ID to Aadhaar can now be accelerated. Like the PAN card, the Election Commission is now seriously working on the plan to link the Voter Identity Card (EPIC) to Aadhaar.
In this regard, an important meeting of the Election Commission is going to be held next week, in which top officials of the Home Ministry, Law Ministry and the Aadhaar issuing institution UIDAI will participate. The aim of this initiative is to make the voter list more clean by identifying fake and duplicate voters.
According to the Indian Express report, after the amendment in the Representation of the People Act, 1951 in 2021, the Election Commission started collecting Aadhaar numbers from voters voluntarily. However, till now the Election Commission has not linked the database of Aadhaar and voter ID card. This process was introduced so that the voter list could be purified by identifying duplicate voter registrations, but linking Aadhaar was not made mandatory.
An important meeting is going to happen
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi will meet Union Home Secretary Govind Mohan, Legislative Department Secretary Rajiv Mani and UIDAI CEO Bhuvnesh Kumar on this issue on March 18. This meeting is taking place at a time when the Trinamool Congress has raised the issue of voters having the same EPIC number in some states including West Bengal. On this, the Election Commission has admitted that in some states the same numbers were re-issued due to wrong alphanumeric series.
The Election Commission recently announced that voters who have been issued duplicate EPIC numbers will be given new numbers within the next three months. The Commission also clarified that having the same EPIC number does not mean that the voters are fake, but any voter can vote only in the constituency where he is registered.
