Thread by @digitaldutta

Short Thread on #Aadhaar Voter ID linking idea, where it comes from and why you should care about it seriously. Proposal to link Aadhaar was pushed by Nilekani to ECI. This was executed by ECI in 2014 by terming it National Electoral Roll Purification - Authentication Programme.

The first pilot of this exercise of linking Voter ID with Aadhaar was carried out in Nizamabad and Hyderabad districts in Nov 2014 by IAS official Ahmed Babu. Babu claimed this excercise helped remove duplicate voters and recommend to ECI. ECI made it a national programme in 2015

Supreme Court which has ordered Aadhaar to be only used for subsidies halted this exercise in Aug 2015. By then Chief Electoral Officer of AP & Telangana deleted 40 lakh voters in Telangana and another 25 Lakhs in AP. ECI linked Aadhaar with Voter ID without informing the voters

During Telangana Assembly elections in 2018, the Chief Electoral Officer of Telangana was warned of these excessive deletions and several political parties went to court about it. On the day of Elections in Dec 2018, at-least 20 lakh voters could not vote.

https://twitter.com/ndtvvideos/status/1071261910794854400?s=20

So to link Voter IDs with Aadhaar, ECI shared all the voter data to Govt in AP & Telangana. Particularly to 360 degree profile State Resident Data HUBs. ECI and Govt used already existing Aadhaar numbers from Govt databases. They didn't tell people or ask for permission.

All data from this State Resident Data HUB of Andhra Pradesh leaked to Telugu Desam Party during the 2019 General Elections for Voter Profiling. There were complaints from the opposition YSRCP to ECI. As AP & Telangana had common databases, even Telangana residents data leaked.

ECI asked Chief Electoral Officer of AP to investigate, he said data didn't leak from them. Telangana Govt launched an SIT to look into it and wrote to UIDAI saying forensics shows data is from SRDH or UIDAI database. Ahmed Babu, incharge for AP SRDH said it didn't leak from them

Aadhaar Voter ID linking has not resulted in finding any duplicate voters, but only resulted in voters being unable to vote and data leaks to builds voter profiles. Then why link Aadhaar to Voter ID? The Answer is online voting. Telangana has already started experiments on it.

Only other nation with e-voting is Estonia. Estonia is a tiny little eastern nation, which was known to be a world bank laboratory to experiment all new technologies. Estonia was able to digitize their economy using a digital id (Aadhaar). India wants to do the same.

Hyderabad united AP had similar journey with estonia because of World Bank assistance and hence all the experiments of Aadhaar Voter ID in Telangana, AP. These experiments have been a disaster in these states. All official RTI documents can accessed here archive.org/details/digita…

Link to another thread of all the data that was leaky in AP and further shared to Telugu Desam Party during general elections in 2019.

https://twitter.com/digitaldutta/status/1026686244149813249?s=20