Bill for Compulsory Voting - Centre for Policy Research

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COMMENTARY

Bill for Compulsory Voting Bhanu Joshi

This article argues that the Gujarat government’s attempt to legislate compulsory voting in local body elections targets the wrong symptom and gives the wrong medicine. The dichotomy of not willing to constitute local governments on one hand, and then making voting compulsory to enhance participation on the other, is simply absurd and risks setting a dangerous precedence.

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hen Gujarat prepared to launch India’s first online voting system for the Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation elections in 2010, a government official had told me in a jaded voice, “Gujarat will become the first state in India to implement this. We are getting inquiries from other states about how to replicate the system”. The disinterest in his voice was palpable, given that he had received many such visitors like me. After some briefing by the technical staff, amidst the beeps of servers, the same official said, “The middle class doesn’t vote; this is for them.” As the cliched indelible ink went digital, the Gujarat government and the State Election Commission (SEC) were called upon by the courts, and after a legal battle, the e-voting system was scaled up for the entire state. Compulsory Voting

Bhanu Joshi ([email protected]) is a researcher at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

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The Gujarat government will soon be, again, in the courts to defend the Gujarat Local Authorities Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2009 which makes voting for the rural local bodies like gram panchayats, zilla parishads, etc, and urban local bodies such as the municipal corporations, nagar panchayats, etc, compulsory for its citizens. The Gujarat Assembly passed the bill in 2009, but it was sent back by the then Governor Kamla Beniwal observing that “forcing voters to vote is against the principles of individual liberty”. This bill was adopted again in 2011 but could only receive the governor’s assent with a change of guard in the Raj Bhawan. Essentially, what should have been a potential issue for discussion around questions of participation and democratic trends in the local elections, has been stretched to debate compulsory voting in national and state elections. Notwithstanding the comments made by Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Brahma “that such a provision may not be correct”, a rational debate on the december 27, 2014

ramification of this bill on local elections has deluded the topic. The context of this bill is the local elections and hence, it is important to highlight how the bill not only targets the wrong symptom, but goes on to give the wrong medicine. The argument for compulsory voting can broadly be categorised into two narratives. First is the narrative that the act of voting is construed as a proof of democratic participation and non-voting equals an amorphous noninterest in democratic values and duties. Second is the oft-raised question around the “representativeness of the elected representative”. Simply put, if an elected leader does not get over 50% of the votes in their constituency, their representativeness is in question. By making voting a compulsory act, the questions of legitimacy of the elected representative will never pop up. An analysis of electoral data in local elections shows that rural local bodies have had higher turnouts than their urban counterparts in almost all states of India. Data from 2009-13 of city corporation elections in major cities reveal that the turnout has been low across states (Figure 1, p 23). Taking six megacities as a sample, we find that the turnouts in the city corporations average around 50%, while the average turnout for national elections (1952-2014) has been 60%. It is, thus, a fact that turnouts in the urban local body elections are lower than the elections to national, state and rural local bodies. The causality of this lower turnout, however, needs elaboration. One of the reasons for this low turnout is the inconsistencies and high error rates in the electoral rolls of the SEC, which fail to capture the urban electorates, which is more diverse, mobile, fragmented and spatially segregated. This results in mass omissions and commissions of names in the electoral rolls. This is further exacerbated when a financially-starved and functionally-poor SEC is tasked to prepare and update the electoral rolls in the same manner as the Election Commission of India. The SEC has not been able to develop a mechanism of sharing the electoral rolls for conducting local elections. A well-documented case came from Bengaluru city vol xlIX no 52

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COMMENTARY

turnout should not come to us as a surprise.

Figure 1: Turnout in the Last Election to the Municipal Corporations of Major Cities (%) 70 62

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58

60

Deny Democracy, Force Voting

Ahmedabad

45

Bhavnagar

42

44

Vadodara

41

Surat

50 44

Rajkot

45

Mumbai

Turnouts

42

44

Bengaluru

53 50 40 30 20 10

Gandhinagar

Jamnagar

Kolkata

Delhi

Chennai

Hyderabad

0

Source: Respective State Election Commissions.

corporation elections in 2010, where the electoral rolls were alleged to have been inflated with 7 million official voters as against an expected 5.6 million voters according to the 2001 Census. It was argued that, if the latter figure was to be believed, the actual voter turnout in Bengaluru could be as high as 55% and not the reported 40%. Similar sentiments were also expressed by various civil society groups and politicians after the Mumbai city corporation elections of 2012. The second and more intuitive argument for low turnouts is usually attributed to “voter apathy” or “middle class discontentment” – phrases that exemplify a secession of the urban electorate from the democratic processes. We need more understanding around why the urban voter is disincentivised or sees no value in voting for local elections while, comparatively, turns up in much larger numbers for the state and national elections. A partial answer to this question is imbued in the way our urban local governments have been functioning, resulting in non-recognition of the local governments as an institution for policy intervention or an individual grievance redressal in the electorates’ mind. Principally, the local governments have not been able to carve out a political agenda distinct from the national and state agendas. Civic issues like garbage, road maintenance, street lights, water supply, public health and slum improvement are never associated with local bodies because they have been espoused by the state governments. Economic & Political Weekly

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december 27, 2014

The states then delegate other important municipal functions like city planning including town planning and land regulation to parastatal organisations like urban development authorities which result into further dilution of the local governance agenda. Most local governments do not have the financial capacity to undertake independent work without formal approvals of their state governments, reducing them to a mere public works department-like body. Since our mayors are not directly elected nor are they provided minimum tenure, the result is a non-persuasive institution which the urbanite cannot look up to. The result of this unaccountable, subserviced, half-hearted local governance being manifested in lower

The same Gandhinagar, which became India’s first municipality to have an e-voting system, was refused a municipality status by the Gujarat government by denying elections and elected local government. The Saher Jagrut Nagrik Parishad filed a petition against the state in the Gujarat High Court, resulting in orders for municipalisation and immediate conduct of elections. In this particular case, the advocate general on behalf of the state government argued that there was no compulsion on the state government to constitute a corporation and that constituting a municipality would unnecessarily subject its people of local taxes, whereas the state government is already providing for the civic services. The presiding judge remarked, “Recognition of the popular will of the people through electoral process promotes constitutionalism, which ensures diffusion of powers, necessitates different independent centres of decision-making”. The dichotomy of not willing to constitute local governments on the one hand, and then making compulsory voting to enhance participation on the other, is simply absurd. It risks setting dangerous precedence and will result in the debate around local governments in urban India being ignored.

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