The Election Commission (EC) has made it mandatory to upload Secondary School Certificate (SSC) or equivalent examination certificates to its server for citizens applying for voter registration or National Identity Card (NID) as “educationally qualified” individuals.
In a directive issued on Wednesday, the NID branch of the EC Secretariat instructed all registration officers, as well as upazila and thana election officers, to comply with the new requirement.
The directive says applicants may submit relevant documents, including SSC or equivalent certificates, passports, or self-signed proof copies, along with the prescribed voter or NID registration forms, where applicable. These documents will then be linked to the national database.
It further notes that although SSC certificates are required for verification of NID information, particularly for correcting details such as date of birth, some thana and upazila election offices have not been consistently uploading these documents to the database for individuals with secondary or higher educational qualifications.
As a result, verification of SSC certificates for NID data correction has not been possible in some cases, creating difficulties in decision-making, the directive signed by NID branch Director Saiful Islam said.
To address the issue, the EC has now made it compulsory to include SSC certificates in the database for the registration of individuals with secondary or higher education. It has also instructed that for those with higher secondary education or above, SSC certificates must be uploaded to the server, while certificates of the highest educational qualification must be preserved at the respective upazila election offices.
At the same time, the EC has instructed regional and district election officers to supervise and monitor the activities of upazila election offices.