Centre introduces Bill to link voter ID, Aadhaar cards to stop 'fraudulent voting'

NEW DELHI: The Centre introduced today the Election Laws (Amendment Bill) 2021 to link voter identity and Aadhaar cards, despite objections by the Opposition parties over the move.

Law Minister Kiren Rijiju, while rejecting the Opposition MPs’ statements that the Bill would violate the fundamental rights of citizens, clarified that the Amendment was only meant to stop bogus and fraudulent voting.

The Bill also seeks to allow the electoral registration officers to ask for Aadhaar numbers from "persons already included in the electoral roll for the purposes of authentication of entries in the electoral roll, and to identify registration of the name of the same person in the electoral roll of more than one constituency or more than once in the same constituency."

In March, former law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had told Lok Sabha in a written reply that the poll panel has proposed to link the electoral roll with the "Aadhaar ecosystem" with a "view to curb the menace of multiple enrolments of the same person at different places".

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