Over 67 lakh voters have downloaded a digital voter ID, known as the electronic Electoral Photo ID Card (E-EPIC), from the time the document was made available until December 23, 2022, the Election Commission of India (ECI) said on Monday in a Right to Information (RTI) response obtained by The Hindu. Along with e-PAN and e-Aadhaar, the E-EPIC is one of the few generally accepted identity documents that can be downloaded as a legally valid PDF file.
About 9.8 crore voters are currently eligible to download an E-EPIC, the ECI said in its RTI response, that is, 6.8% of voters who are eligible to download an E-EPIC as a PDF document have done so — this is equivalent to less than 1% of all registered voters in India, going by data released by the ECI in past years. As of 2019, 91.2 crore people were registered to vote in India, meaning that the total number of people eligible to download an E-EPIC in the first place is only around 10% of the overall electoral base.