COMMENTS

Of all electoral reform agendas in India, quality of voter lists is arguably the most neglected. Unjustified deletions of voter names in Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur and Varanasi and the consequent public interest litigation in the Bombay high court have brought the issue into focus temporarily.

However, stakeholders across a wide spectrum, including polling agencies, psephologists, civil society and the Election Commission itself, have not yet gauged the extent to which poor quality voter lists may be systematically undermining the quality of electoral outcomes in India.

Bangalore-based nonprofit Janaagraha has been working on improving voter list management for close to a decade. A proper urban electoral (PURE) list survey carried out ahead of the Delhi assembly elections in 2013 had revealed average error rates of 20%.

- -  Our ongoing research indicates that voter lists in several cities and constituencies are so poor that accurate polling part maps are not available and addresses in voter lists are incomplete, seriously hindering even an evaluation of the quality of voter lists.

The emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party has added to number of constituencies witnessing tight contests and narrow margins of victory. If, on the one hand, margins of victory are thin, and on the other, voter lists have high error rates, there is no assurance that electoral outcomes are legitimate and reflect popular choice.

Secondly, voter turnout reported from cities is probably understated and therefore voter apathy in cities could be a myth. - - - Voter turnout in a democracy is an important signal to all stakeholders — voters and civil society, political parties, psephologists, researchers and EC — and a misstated voter turnout could lead to several wrong conclusions and policy decisions.

Clearly then, voter list management in Indian cities needs serious systemic reform . The process is currently characterized by poor mapping of polling part boundaries, incomplete addresses , lack of a sufficiently sophisticated, integrated and open database, temporary staffing and poor incentivization for updating voter lists.

Reforms targeted at precisely these five factors are needed to establish the integrity of voter lists, especially in Indian cities where flux in voting populations is high and rising. Reforms, however, will begin only with an acknowledgement of their need.

The recognition of voter lists as a high-priority reform agenda will mark an inflection point in the maturing of Indian democracy.

The last couple of decades since the Seshan era have seen much needed supplyside electoral reforms led by EC and the judiciary — near elimination of booth capturing , regulation of money and crime in politics, introduction of EVMs and the NOTA option, all of which focused primarily on candidates.

For the full text of the column by Srikanth Viswanathan in the ToI, click here.

A large part of the blame for this state of affairs remaining so from long is to be borne by the Civil Society organisations in the picture, who have gone about conveying the impression that they can manage all that is required for compiling accurate voter lists, and thereafter maintaining them, through their quarter-baked approaches.  It's high time the job is made over to professional companies.
 

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The total number of voters in Bangalore urban district, including BBMP limits, is 70,32,000. This is equal to 67.58 percent Electoral Population (EP) ratio. On April 7, the closing day of voters' registration it was 65.19.

1) Shouldn't the facility of registration as a voter be available right through the year, so that when a person attains the age of 18, and has resided at a location for 6 months, he/ she is readily able to get onto the list?

2) Is transposition of voters (using Form-8A) available across states? If not, what is the procedure to be adopted when a registered voter shifts to a different state? If yes, how can it work when the master voter lists are apparently maintained in regional languages?

3) What about the spelling, age, sex and other errors, which when attempting to correct through Form-6A, end up generating a fresh set of errors?

4) What about the differences in the entries between the list and the EPIC?

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The plight of many other common voters across the city is worse. A late father-in-law is shown as husband, more than 50 voters are aged 150 years, some even 0 and below 18 years. A deeper search will elicit that one Shankar from Okalipuram (ward 96, Gandhinagar assembly) is 655 years old! A ‘Thayamma’ under ‘Other’s name’ lives at house number 271, which has at least 33 voters. These are just a few other surprises on the list.

What went wrong? - We are looking into the real reasons for this error as the hard copies available with us are all correct.

For the full report in the TOI, click here.

The question should be 'what is wrong' - not 'what went wrong'. And, the answer is 'everything'. The present team is just not capable of doing a proper job; just restructure the entire set up, with the job of preparing and maintaining the voters' lists across the country outsourced to professional private players.

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Passport Seva Kendras (PSK) will make the application process more user-friendly; front-end activities will be outsourced to private partners. Also, online links will be established with district police headquarters in all states for quick verification. "These reforms were needed due to unintentional delays. A serious exercise has begun to bring about structural reforms too. The main data centre for PSKs will be in Delhi; a data recovery centre will be in Chennai and other network operations unit will be based in Delhi," Mr S M Krishna said. For the full report in the TOI, click here.

The outsourcing is to none less than TCS, and not some fly-by-night operator, like the SEC has presently engaged for issue of the EPIC's. When the Passport Department can undertake such structural radical reforms, what prevents the EC/ SEC from following suit?

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The election identity cards have entries in both Kannada and English. "Baraha" is the software programmed to the EPIC drive in Karnataka. Officials have been finding technical errors which have not been addressed by the Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka, despite the issue being brought to their notice. "If we type in Kannada, everything will be fine on the desktop and when we take printouts, errors will be seen. For example, if we type Inayatulla in Baraha, after taking the printouts, we see the word as Ainayatulla. The typographical errors have been occurring and we do not know how to fix them. If we key in 'I', what appears is 'Ai'. We will get to know this only after taking printouts," said an election staff member in BBMP.

For the full report in the ToI, click here.

That there was a serious issue with the trans-literation has been evident right from the very beginning. What is shocking is that none of the three agencies involved, namely CEO, NIC and BBMP, has bothered to address it so far. And, neither has Janaagraha, who have instead been undertaking laborious clean up of the voter list of one ward, under an MOU with the CEO for years together, for it to get mucked up all over again, each time a fresh entry is made.

Very clearly, besides, how can "Transposition of Entry in Electoral Rolls" (via form -18A) across states ever work when the master voter lists in each of the states are maintained in their respective languages?

With such incompetency at the very first stage of the democratic process, how can we ever expect to get better quality of people to represent us? What a crying shame? How can we have any pride in calling ourselves a democracy?

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