Data And Elections | Linking voter ID with Aadhaar is dangerous, and pointless

What is the one activity where the State should be incentivised to ensure that each citizen gets to participate on an equal footing as anybody else, nobody steals another citizens chance, and nobody gets more than their fair chance.

There is a case to be made that election-integrity is the most ideal use for a unique identifier such as the Aadhaar project. Theoretically, that is. Thankfully for us, the rollout of Aadhaar over the last decade or so should give us ample warnings, not only that the idea is dangerous, but also that it is foolhardy, and almost un-implementable in any meaningful manner.

On June 18, the Government of India issued a notification suggesting the linking of the Aadhaar with the Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) database. The enabling legislation (passed in December) says that no entries in the electoral roll shall be deleted for inability of an individual to intimate or furnish Aadhaar number due to such sufficient cause as may be prescribed. It appears from the notification that the only ‘sufficient cause’ is not having an Aadhaar. This belies the government’s claim that the linking is voluntary and not mandatory.

With the final deadline for linking of Permanent Account Number (PAN) for Income Tax purposes with Aadhaar being March 31, 2023, it is reasonable to assume that as the law stands today, by next year, everybody’s voter ID will have to be necessarily linked with their Aadhaar.

Having said that, it is necessary to engage with the supposed benefits of the scheme to link the two. It is said that Aadhaar linkage will improve integrity of the electoral roll, and by extension our election process. The question begs itself, don’t we boast one of the most comprehensive and thorough electoral rolls in the world, the pride of our country?

Take the argument forward. The government is not verifying our biometrics at the time of voting, which is where the test of uniqueness comes into play. That is unwieldy and impractical. Or in other words, you will not be turned away from the booth because your biometric doesn’t match. The Supreme Court almost certainly will not permit that. So then why this futile exercise?

Weigh that against the pitfalls. First, exclusion. We have seen umpteen cases where people with valid Aadhaar numbers still are excluded from benefits, either because their biometrics don’t match with the records in the system, or because they have been impersonated. emember that Aadhaar was always meant to be biometric verification, whereas now it has become a ‘card’, or more likely, the printout of a card – not very different from any of the other identity cards that establish our existence.

The bigger danger is that unlike what the government claimed in, and promised to, the Supreme Court, the Aadhaar data is not all that secure. The UIDAI defends itself that the data has not leaked from their end (whether the six feet walls are doing a fine enough job is another question altogether). Even then, many of the organisations that store Aadhaar data have suspect security, and have been leaking.

The pitfall is not that the data will be accessible to people who have no business to. Yes, that is certainly a harm, but the greater harm is that data about voting patterns and habits (such as even, whether one voted, what time of election day one voted, and whether one voted during the general elections, or also state or panchayat elections) will be accessible to political parties. This might seem innocuous, but remember the level of analytical accuracy a corporation like Meta (Facebook, as it was) is able to derive from data.

Combine that with data about whether a person is a recipient of government doles, or a tax-payer, and you get very useful insight, if you are a political party. We think that this is beyond the realm of the possible, but the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed us that it is we who are limited in our imagination. In a way, data about the voter is the ultimate prize. If the voter is on the politician’s side, who need be feared?

To be clear, this is not to insinuate that all the data is going to be made available for mapping. In fact, the Supreme Court has protected us to an extent by mandating that data can be stored for not longer than six months. But for the level of surveillance that we are being forced to live with without redress, this is not an empty threat.

The answer to this is not that we are anyway giving much more data to private corporations for free. It is the government’s job to protect us from such misuse with an effective data protection law. The crucial difference is that private corporations can only affect our spending and consumption. When governments influence us, it is our futures and our democracy itself that is at stake.