India set to link voter rolls to national IDs

Bloomberg

India’s lower house of parliament approved legislation seeking to link electoral rolls with a nationwide digital identity database to stop fraudulent voting despite protests from the opposition and civil society groups, who allege the move violates citizens’ privacy.
The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill was introduced and approved within hours in the Lok Sabha via a voice vote amid angry protests by opposition lawmakers. The legislation allows linking voter profiles to the national digital ID, known as Aadhaar, which uses biometrics and a unique number to track
individuals.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which has a strong majority in the house, says the changes to the existing electoral law are meant to curb the problem of one person holding multiple voters’ cards in different places. The opposition says linking Aadhaar details to voting rights could compromise the secrecy of the ballot and interfere with an independent electoral process.
“It’s an infringement of the fundamental right to privacy,” Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, a leader of the main opposition Congress party, said in the Lok Sabha. “You can’t bulldoze with this kind of legislative document.” More than a dozen civil society organisations have voiced concerns with the bill, calling it an unnecessary move, which could exclude some of India’s most marginalised groups and undermine voters’ trust in the electoral system.
“If biometric authentication is made a requirement, it will almost certainly lead to exclusion,” of poor people from welfare schemes similar to what has happened before in rural job guarantee programs, said Maansi Verma, chair of the research group Article 21 Trust and a lawyer working in the area of digital privacy. “It is going to affect a very fundamental right — the right to vote. It strikes at the very root of the world’s largest democracy.”
The government has dismissed these arguments as baseless. Law Minister Kiren Rijiju told parliament the bill aims to strengthen the electoral system by weeding out fake voting.