Yechury urges ECI to put 'Voter-Aadhaar linking' on hold

"With the lack of a data protection law, we oppose any potential sharing of all Voter-IDs linked with Aadhaar," Yechuri said to the ECI. According to the ECI, the voter ID cards' linking with Aadhaar cards is aimed at establishing the identity of electors and authentication of entries in the electoral roll.

Kolkata:CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury wrote a letter to the Election Commission of India (ECI) urging the poll body to keep the Aadhaar-Voter Card linking process on hold till concerns of security, privacy and voter deletions with the Aadhaar Voter ID linking are sorted out. Already, the ECI has started the linking process.

"With the lack of a data protection law, we oppose any potential sharing of all Voter-IDs linked with Aadhaar," Yechuri said to the ECI. According to the ECI, the voter ID cards' linking with Aadhaar cards is aimed at establishing the identity of electors and authentication of entries in the electoral roll.

In the letter, Yechury said "As part of this exercise several Chief Electoral Officers across the country have obtained the Aadhaar data of voters from several other databases like NPR, PDS, and State Resident Data Hubs(SRDH). These electoral offices linked Aadhaar with Voter ID of 31 crore voters without informing the individual voters and instead using algorithms to automatically link them based on already existing data."

"This process has resulted in voter deletions across the country and in particular in the state of Telangana, where the NERP-AP exercise of Aadhaar with Voter ID was originally developed," the CPI(M) general secretary stated. Yechuri has alleged that the names of several genuine voters were deleted from the list in the Telangana assembly elections in 2018. Yechury has complained of influencing the election process by erasing the names.

Incidentally, the issue of linking Aadhaar with voter cards was introduced for the first time in 2015. This initiative was aimed at bringing transparency to the voter list.