A bill on electoral reforms that aims to link electoral rolls with the Aadhaar network to eliminate duplication is listed for introduction in Lok Sabha on Monday. The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, aims to give electoral registration officers the authority to ask for Aadhaar numbers from people who want to register as voters “for the purpose of establishing their identity.”
The bill also seeks to allow electoral registration officers to request Aadhaar numbers from ‘persons already included in the voter list for the purposes of verification of entries in the roll, and to identify registration of the same person’s name in the electoral roll of more than one constituency or more than once in the same constituency’. Various provisions of the Representation of the People Acts, 1950 and 1951, would be changed, according to the proposal circulated to Lok Sabha members ahead of its introduction.
Section 23 of the RP Act, 1950 would be altered to facilitate integration of electoral roll data with the Aadhaar ecosystem ‘to minimise the issue of duplicate enrolments of the same individual in different places’. At the same time, the amendment bill states that ‘no application for inclusion of a person’s name in the electoral roll shall be denied, and no entries in the electoral roll shall be deleted because an individual is unable to furnish or intimate his or her Aadhaar number due to such sufficient cause as may be prescribed’.
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