Election Commission Will Get Legal Powers To Link Every Voter ID With Aadhaar: How Will This Help?

As per the reports, the Centre is preparing to make the required legal amendments to ensure linkage of Aadhaar with the voter ID, the law ministry is learnt to have conveyed to the Election Commission of India on Tuesday.

Legal Power To Link Aadhaar With PAN

Soon, the Election Commission might be eligible to link Aadhaar with the Voter Ids as the Central government is looking to amend the Aadhaar act to legally allow the election body to link both the ids.

Sunil Arora, the chief election commissioner and the two election commissioners, Ashok Lavasa and Sunil Chandra, met legislative affairs secretary G Narayan Raju and additional secretary Rita Vashishth to discuss pending electoral reforms.

Also, the government is likely to take the linkage issue to Cabinet for approval soon as this will require an amendment to the Representation of the People Act, 1951.

Why Would They Need To Link Aadhaar Card With The Voter ID?

However, the linkage is considered crucial to the EC’s larger objective of ridding the electoral roll of all discrepancies. 

Also, it is important to the poll panel’s plan to allow domestic migrant workers to vote from anywhere in the country. 

Currently, the panel is considering various technologies, including blockchain, for the same.

Further, CEC Arora sought to point out at the meeting that there are more than 40 different proposals of electoral reforms pending since long.

CEC said “Commission would like to have such meetings with legislative department at regular intervals to pursue all such pending proposals,” at the meeting.

Moreover, the secretary is learnt to have assured the poll panel that several of the proposed reforms are already being examined by the ministry for implementation.

What About The Other Issues?

As per the reports, the other issues discussed at the meeting included offering multiple registration opportunities in a year to first-time voters and substituting the term ‘wife’ by ‘spouse’ in the RP Act to facilitate electoral registration of the spouse of women service officials. 

While the issue of paid news and making false affidavit an electoral offence were also taken up at the meeting. 

also, covering print media and social media intermediaries under Section 126 of the RP Act and amendments in contribution form was discussed.

Apart from that, the EC also held a two-day long conference with its nine working groups and over 20 chief electoral officers to deliberate on the learnings from the general and other elections held recently.

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