The Election Commission of India (ECI) has successfully resolved a nearly two-decade-old issue of duplicate Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers that had been inadvertently assigned to legitimate voters across the country. The problem, which originated in 2005, has been systematically addressed through a comprehensive nationwide cleanup of the electoral database that contains over 99 crore (990 million) registered voters.
“All such electors have since been issued new EPIC cards with new numbers,” the Election Commission announced, marking the completion of a significant electoral roll sanitization effort that spanned all states and Union Territories.
The resolution came as part of the Commission’s broader initiative to maintain the accuracy and integrity of India’s electoral rolls. The issue stemmed from the decentralized issuing of voter IDs that began in 2005, when various States and Union Territories were independently using Assembly Constituency-wise alphanumeric series, resulting in the same EPIC numbers being assigned to different voters in different constituencies.
Extensive Verification Process
The cleanup operation involved Chief Electoral Officers from all states and Union Territories, along with Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) from every Assembly constituency and polling station throughout India. These officials conducted a thorough search of the entire electoral database to identify instances of duplicate EPIC numbers.
During field-level verification, officials confirmed that holders of similar EPIC numbers were indeed genuine electors registered in different assembly constituencies and polling stations. This finding reinforced that the issue was not related to fraudulent registrations but rather a systemic problem in the numbering convention used since 2005.
“The meticulous verification process ensured that legitimate voters weren’t disenfranchised while addressing the technical issue of duplicate ID numbers,” explained an electoral officer associated with the cleanup operation.
Technical Origins of the Issue
The ECI traced the genesis of the problem to 2005, when the process of issuing EPIC cards was managed in a decentralized manner with each constituency using its own alphanumeric series. Without centralized coordination, this approach inevitably led to the same numbers being issued in different constituencies across the country.
Over the years, as electoral data was digitized and centralized, these duplicate numbers became increasingly problematic for database management and voter verification processes. The issue had persisted due to the massive scale of India’s electoral system and the complexity involved in resolving duplicate identifiers without disrupting legitimate voter registrations.
