Amid opposition protests, the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday passed the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, which will allow the linking of Aadhaar numbers to electoral roll data to weed out fake voters. The bill was passed in the Lok Sabha on Monday. In a telephonic interview with News18, former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) of India OP Rawat shed light on various aspects of the bill and how it will benefit voters. Edited excerpts:
How will the electoral reforms bill passed by Parliament help the Election Commission of India?
The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill was based on the ECI’s proposals. The linking of Aadhaar with voter ID will provide an additional tool to authenticate a voter’s identity even when polling agents fail to verify. This may go a long way in facilitating remote voting for poor migrant workers, students temporarily away from home for study or employment-related exigencies, NRIs, and very old, hospitalised and infirm voters who can not go to polling stations.
Why was the bill needed to link Aadhaar to voter ID?
The bill was needed to enable the ECI to go ahead with the voluntary linking of Aadhaar with voter ID, an exercise that was started by the ECI in 2015 and was stopped when the Supreme Court stayed on a PIL all processes asking for Aadhaar.
Will the Aadhaar-voter ID linking lead to privacy breaches and mass disenfranchisement, like some opposition parties have raised concerns?
It can not lead to mass disenfranchisement. Breach of privacy is not likely so long as the ECI’s efforts on data protection continue to be updated to keep these as robust as they are today.
The linking of Aadhaar to voter ID was pending for long. The matter was heard by the SC also. Now the opposition is protesting. As a former CEC, how do you see this?
The opposition’s protest seems to be rooted in hastily tabling the bill and passing it in a few hours the same day coupled with the close proximity of important state elections.
Should the bill have been sent to the select committee?
This is in the political domain and, therefore, no comment.
Do you think linking Aadhaar with voter ID will eradicate the problem of multiple entries as well as fake/bogus entries?
One of the important benefits of linking will be easily weeding out duplicates in the electoral rolls. At present, the ECI has to use deduplication software, photo recognition software and physical verification by BLO to achieve this objective.
The passed bill has the provision to voluntarily provide the Aadhaar number. Do you think this will serve the intended purpose of linking Aadhaar to voter ID?
Yes, it will serve the purpose as we saw in 2015 the response of the voters was overwhelming because they also want that only genuine people vote and no vitiation of the polling process takes place by impersonators.
What’s your message to voters who have suspicions, if any, over the new bill?
Voters will not have any suspicions.
What are some other reforms that will benefit voters?
Service voters’ wives were entitled to an e-postal ballot. But women have started joining the armed forces and, therefore, benefitting their husbands was required. So the word ‘wife’ has been replaced by ‘spouse’. It will serve the cause of gender equity as well as benefit voters. The qualifying date to enrol was 1st January until now. Anybody attaining 18 years of age on 2nd January had to wait for one full year before enrolling. In case elections at his/her area were held in between he/she could not vote despite being 18 years of age. This will now reduce to three months and will benefit a large number of young and new voters.
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