About more than 85 million names on India's electoral rolls were either fake or duplicate, chief election commissioner HS Brahma said, while announcing an initiative to make the voter list error-free by linking it to Aadhaar before August 15. Aadhaar numbers will help the poll panel to weed out duplicate or fakes names from the rolls as the election commission will use it to authenticate voter identity. About 500 million of India’s 850 million voters have Aadhaar numbers. “Two months would be sufficient for electoral registration officers across India to do Aadhaar seeding into the newly-created digital database of all voters,” Brahma said.

Duplicate and fake voters are a national issue, around 10-12% of the total number of voters, but the problem is more acute in some parts with over 40% names in the electoral rolls of a city in southern India found either fake or duplicate, the CEC said. Those who have an Aadhaar number can visit the National Voters’ Service Portal to feed in their unique number. Booth-level polling officers will also be visiting homes in the next few months to seek one’s Aadhaar number. The EC will also be providing an SMS service to provide Aadhaar numbers. After authenticating the number, EC officials will seed them in one’s voter identity card.

By Premji