One would wonder looking at the magnanimity of the electoral process. 1, 368, 430 EVMs, 828, 804 polling stations. Wow!!! The voter turn out in General Elections was 59-60% and assembly elections in A.P. was around 60-65% despite tremendous amount of awareness campaign to vote. The city which so called well developed and starting point of major awareness campaigns to vote, Mumbai, voted just 43%. What might be the potential reasons?
There might be many reasons like disinterested to vote, no time, geographical displacement, not having Voter I.D., weather conditions, not having name in the voter’s list etc. Can we overcome from these lame excuses? The answer is a very big YES. Technically speaking, we can increase the percentage of voter turnout massively by taking it to people rather than making them come down to the polling booths. In fact it would be a herculean task but can be achievable with proper management and taking help of technology.
We can actually make people to SMS is one solution to some extent. Because for that to happen there should be proper screening of the Voter I.D. According to T.R.A.I. we have 375 million registered users in the telecom sector that can access to mobile phones. And our voter list is 700 million!!!!
Another potential reason behind the less percentage of the voter turnout was because of absence of Absentee Voting. The impact of absence of absentee voting is clear in the recently held Assembly as well as General Elections. There was truly very high awareness of right to vote in the youth (18-35) but, practically the scenario was different. The maximum percentage of voter turnout was from housewives. The youth was ready to vote but there were many technical reasons they could exercise their vote. One major thing was most of them are displaced or relocated in different parts of the country or rather parts of the world. The other reason was they could not find their name in the voter list. I think we can resolve the second reason by correcting ourselves and make sure that our name is there in the list. But, for the first reason we need to have a solution. Supreme Court should give green signal for the Absentee Voting.
Many NGOs and individuals had put petition under Public Interest Litigation (PIL). Till date there was no action taken by the Supreme Court. There are many countries which has the Absentee voting system. In fact to some extent it is applicable in our country also. People who are in polling duty and serving in armed forces can cast their vote through post. NRI’s are disqualified from voting during their stay in abroad. Government should take steps in amending the Representation of the People Act (RPA) and introduce Absentee Voting for all. Basically, absentee voting can be executed through Postal Voting, Proxy Voting and Internet Voting.
There is another procedure to increase the voter turnout. It is Early voting. To avoid congestion for the public on the official day of election and also to have convenience for the voters Early Voting can adopted. Because of the humongous amount out electoral roll, the task for executing these ideas seems impractical. But, it can be done efficiently with proper structuring of the management of electoral process. A committee has to be setup and study the numbers. To make this happen we need to have unique social security number. By having SSN Govt can track the person anywhere in the world. Indian Govt has already started the process of assigning SSN to everybody recently. The project to build the database for the SSN was given to our proud Software companies. So, in coming few years we might see many positive developments in voting. Let us be Sanguine!!!
-Optimistic Indian
