Election Laws Amendment Bill To Link Voter ID With Aadhaar passed in Lok Sabha

The Election Laws(Amendment) Bill 2021, which links voter identity cards with Aadhaar, was passed by the Lok Sabha on Monday. A voice vote was used to pass the bill.

A voice vote was used to pass the bill.

The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, aims to give electoral registration officers the power to ask for Aadhaar numbers from persons who want to register as voters “for the purpose of establishing the identification.”

It also seeks to allow electoral registration officers to request 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 same person’s name in the electoral roll of more than one constituency or more than once in the same constituency,” according to the bill.

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.”

The bill aims to change specific portions of the 1950 and 1951 Representation of the People Acts.

Section 23 of the RP Act, 1950 would be altered to facilitate integration of electoral roll data with the Aadhaar ecosystem “to minimise the scourge of duplicate enrolments of the same individual in different places,” according to the bill’s Statement of Objects and Reasons.

Section 14 of the RP Act of 1950 will be amended to provide for four “qualifying” days for eligible people to register to vote.

The only qualifying date is currently January 1st of each year.

Individuals who turn 18 on or before January 1 are eligible to vote. Those who reach 18 after that must wait an entire year to register to vote.

The qualifying dates for the preparation or modification of electoral rolls will now be “the first day of January, 1st day of April, 1st day of July, and 1st day of October in a calendar year.”

Sections 20 and 60 of the RP Act, 1950 and 1951, respectively, will be amended to make elections gender-neutral for service voters.

The change will also help to replace the word “wife” with “spouse,” making the laws “gender-neutral.”