Electoral Reforms: Cabinet okays voluntary Aadhaar-Voter ID seeding

New Delhi: The Union Cabinet on Wednesday is learnt to have cleared a bill on electoral reforms. The reforms will allow the Election Commission to seed the Aadhaar number with electoral rolls on a voluntary basis, the report said.

According to the Bill cleared by the Cabinet, the electoral law will be made "gender-neutral" for service voters. Another provision of the bill will allow new voters to enrol on four different dates every year.

As of now, those turning 18 on or before January 1 of every year are only allowed to register as voters. In August 2019, the Election Commission had proposed amendments, including the linking of the Voter ID with Aadhaar number which will curb multiple enrolments of the same individual at different places. This has been a long-pending proposal of the Election Commission. In 2015, when the EC launched the National Electoral Law Purification and Authentication Programme to link the Aadhaar number with the Voter ID number, the programme was stalled after the Supreme Court ordered that the use of Aadhaar would be optional for availing of welfare schemes.

According to reports, the Law ministry started working on the proposal in 2020 when Ravi Shankar Prasad was the minister.

In August this year, minister Kiren Rijiju informed Parliament that the government was considering the EC's proposal.

"After consulting various stakeholders, the Commission submitted its 244th and 255th Reports encompassing various aspects of electoral reforms which, inter alia, include disqualification from contesting election on framing of charges, regulation of election finance and opinion polls, ban on paid news etc," the minister said in a written reply.