CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury has written a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar raising concerns of security, privacy and voter deletions in the process of linking Aadhaar with voter identity cards.
As the Election Commission re-started the process of linking Aadhaar with voter ID, he reminded Mr. Kumar that the Supreme Court had stopped the National Electoral Rolls Purification - Authentication Programme in 2015. He said in the letter that as part of this exercise several Chief Electoral Officers across the country have obtained the Aadhaar data of voters from several other databases such as NPR, PDS and State Resident Data Hubs (SRDH). “These electoral officers linked Aadhaar with voter ID of 31 crore voters without informing the individual voters and instead using algorithms to automatically link them based on already existing data,” Mr. Yechury said and added that process had resulted in voter deletions in Telangana during the 2018 Assembly elections. “Further there have been data breaches of voter IDs linked to Aadhaar in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,” Mr. Yechury said.
