The Election Commission’s reported move to get voters to link their Aadhaar number to the electoral identity card is uncalled for. It can even become counter-productive for myriad reasons. For one, it adds one more tiresome process to the long list of Aadhaar-related formalities forced upon the public, some of which have been thankfully nullified by the Supreme Court.

The EC is of the view that such linkage would help avoid duplication and bring in more transparency and authenticity to the electoral process. Linking two distinctly different documents of proof could in fact jeopardise their very raison d’être as Aadhaar, as explained by the Supreme Court, is just a proof of identity and not of citizenship; by trying to seed it to the electoral id, which enables a person (citizen) to take part in electoral processes, the Election Commission may end up creating an atmosphere where the very concept of citizenship is diluted and undermined. Granted, the Aadhaar card is one of the documents of proof accepted by the Election Commission while granting a voter id to a person, but seeding it with the voter id is a completely different ballgame. The voter id contains crucial data about citizens such as their age and residence and this runs the risk of exposing citizens to fraudsters.

Considering Aadhaar’s known vulnerabilities, linking it with the voter id is not necessarily going to help in curbing duplication of identities, even if one considers the difficulties in duplicating biometric proof.

Worse, given that voter id lists are easily accessible, anyone in possession of voter id database could use the new merged data for deeper, multi-layered profiling of citizens like in the case of the infamous Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal in the US. Since the UID is linked to the PAN card and bank accounts, an Aadhaar-voter id could be a dangerous tool in the hands of parties with vested interests as it could help them scan and classify voters based on their income status and many other alarming criteria. The government is in no position to give an assurance that such malpractices will not occur.

Jinoy Jose P Deputy Editor