Secretaries of the home and law ministries, along with the chief executive officer of UIDAI, are likely to discuss a “solution to resolving the issue of the same elector with multiple EPICs”, officials said on conditions of anonymity.
“The core issue of the meeting is to extend 100 percent coverage to all eligible people to register as electors. Logically, this would also mean that the CEC discusses crucial issues, such as removing the repeat EPIC issues so that the voting percentage increases. The scalability of the exercise would also be discussed as out of 99 crore electors, around two-thirds already have Aadhaar. However, since we have not seeded with the EPIC database, we will also discuss the modalities to do so,” they said.
However, the developments appear to contradict ECI’s previous position that Aadhaar linking is not mandatory. The legality of the entire process emanates from Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021, notified in 2022, wherein Aadhaar as an identity card was established.