Maharashtra electoral office to link voter IDs with Aadhaar cards

Mumbai, April 24: With an aim of ridding the electoral rolls of bogus voters, the Maharashtra electoral office has started an aggressive drive to link people's Aadhaar cards with their voter identity cards.

The drive, which started last month, may also help in giving voters an option to cast their franchise online in future, an senior electoral officer in the state said.

Nearly 3,10,000 voters in the state have registered to link their Aadhaar cards with the electoral photo identity cards (EPIC). [Linking of Aadhar numbers with EPICs from March 9]

From Mumbai and Thane, only around 16,000 voters have got themselves registered till now, he said.

"The largest number of people who have registered themselves are from Hingoli district (43,735), followed by Kolhapur (43,554)," he said.

"Since we have got a lukewarm response till now, we will be aggressively holding special camps in colleges and public places to create an awareness about the benefits of registering themselves. Once we achieve a 100 per cent result, we can even plan to give the voters an option to cast their franchise online using biometric system," he said.

Linking the Aadhaar cards with the people's voter ID cards will help the Election Commission to remove bogus IDs from the system and to make voter list transparent, he said.

There are a total 8,35,34880 registered voters in the state, out of whom 4,40,77571 are men, 3,94,56271 women and 1,038 fall in the 'others' category, the official said.

"According to the latest Census figures, around 8.07 crore people are above 18 years of age. Thus, there is a discrepancy between the total the number of people eligible to vote and the total number of voters. It simply means that there are more than 28 lakh bogus voters present. These have to be weeded out at the earliest," he said.

The voters can log on to the State Election Commission website: http://ceo.maharashtra.gov.in/AadhaarSeed/ to feed their Aadhaar numbers in the EC's EPIC database, or they can also do so at their electoral registration offices, he added.

PTI