Told EC we can't link voter ID to Aadhaar unless law is changed, says UIDAI chief Ajay Bhushan Pandey

Unique Identification Authority of India chief executive officer Ajay Bhushan Pandey told  CNBC-TV18 the law will have to be changed to link voter IDs to Aadhaar and he apprised the Election Commission (EC) of the same during a meeting around two weeks ago. Pandey said the Election Commission met with Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) authorities as they wanted to understand the historic  26 September Supreme Court judgment  on Aadhaar and get the agency’s ‘view’ of the same. Pandey added that the EC has to take a call on the 2015 proposal on the linking of voter ID with Aadhaar. “Prior to Aadhaar Act, the Election Commission had initiated an exercise to link voter ID with Aadhaar card, but in August 2015 when the Supreme Court restricted the use of Aadhaar only to few programmes then they suspended that activity,” he said in an interview.  “As far as the UIDAI is concerned, we will open its authentication service to any agency only if there is a backing of law,” he was quoted as saying in the report. [caption id=“attachment_5276941” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. News18[/caption] Soon after the 26 September verdict, reports said EC started preparing to resume the linking of voter ID and Aadhaar. Sources then told Economic Times the poll panel would not make it mandatory for voters to have their voter IDs linked with Aadhaar, but would only allow people to use services such as internet voting if they had linked the two. According to the report, the commission had linked Aadhaar of nearly 38 crore voters in 2015 prior to the suspension of the project was suspended. During an all-party meet in August, ahead of the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls, BJP and some other political parties  urged the Election Commission to link Aadhaar of voters with electoral rolls to weed out duplicate names. With inputs from PTI