HC to direct on linking Aadhaar with voters’ list

A division bench comprising Justice S Manikumar and Justice P T Asha before whom the plea came up on Friday impleaded the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Law Ministry and Home Ministry as parties to the petition and posted the case for further hearing to after two weeks.

Earlier, ECI counsel Niranjan Rajagopalan submitted that ECI supports the petition.

The petitioner M L Ravi, president, Desiya Makkal Sakthi Katchi, had submitted that the process of linking Aadhaar with voters list should be taken on a war footing to arrest duplicate entries along with eradicating repeat, multiple, illegal, invalid and false voters.

Citing the recent by-election at RK Nagar Constituency, where the court had to intervene to address widespread allegation of addition and deletion in the voters list, the petitioner said the process of linking Aadhaar with voters list will enable doing away with huge number of agents occupying polling booths as candidate representatives and squarely rule out bogus votes, impersonation and misuse by officials in collusion with the agents.

He also noted that technicalities in the electoral law may disfranchise many potential voters.  

However, with Aadhaar, the scope for such aspects transpiring could be eradicated and thereby cut down huge costs involved in the verification process as the finger print reading available in Aadhar will eliminate fake, duplicate and repeat voters.

The plea also sought ECI not to conduct either the general elections for Parliament or Assembly without linking Aadhaar to the voters list.