A preliminary investigation has revealed that a URL shared by the EC with an outsourced private company was used in generating the voter ID cards. A 30-year-old man in Jharkhand’s Palamu district was nabbed by the police on August 17 for allegedly hacking the Election Commission’s website for issuing fake voter ID cards, as per a PTI report. This is the second such instance that has been reported in the past week. Four days ago, a man was arrested from the Saharanpur district in Uttar Pradesh for creating over 10,000 fake voter id cards. The accused, Mukesh Kumar, was arrested from Karso village in Chaonpur police station area on a complaint from the Election Commission. The case is being probed by a team of investigators including police officers and city officials. Palamu’s Deputy Commissioner Shashi Ranjan is also one of the investigators. Such incidents increase the risk of voter data manipulation and thus, have detrimental effects on elections. It assumes more importance since the EC is planning to issue digital voter IDs and accept e-KYC on the National Voters’ Services Portal. The government is also considering amending the law to ensure the linking of Voter IDs to Aadhaar which could lay the groundwork to require that all Electoral Photo ID Cards (EPIC) be linked to Aadhaar. More details about the incident and the accused The PTI report revealed the following: The Palamu district administration was informed by EC that the URL used to generate voter identity cards from a Customer…
