Voters are ready, is Election Commission ready?
The General Elections of 2019 are considered very crucial, though I consider every General Election is crucial. Each election has shaped the future of democratic governments. I am aware that barring a few places, the voter participation in these elections has been as good or as bad as in 2014. 2014 had seen a big surge in voting percentage and that momentum was visible in all the subsequent elections of local bodies or state level elections. It shows that our voters are finally realizing the importance of their votes and they believe they can bring in a change. This is a very positive development.
When I match these positive developments with my experience and from the stories I hear from a huge metropolis like Mumbai, voter experience has been quite disappointing. It is not due to voter participation but due to apathy of the people who support Election Commission of Mumbai in this job. This may be true of other metros too. But, let me talk only of Mumbai experience. I will begin with my own area in Powai.
There were huge queues from 6.45 am in the morning in Chandivali assembly constituency that fell under Mumbai North Central Lok Sabha constituency represented currently by Ms. Poonam Mahajan of BJP. The queues didn’t dissipate even till the evening. The voting turned out to be around 58% in this area which is a record for this constituency. This used to be around 45% before 2014.
What beat me was that if there were lines from morning till evening with about 2 hours or more of waiting time, why the voting was still 58%? The waiting time itself would explain it. A booth with 600 votes had one EVM and booths having 1500 votes too had one EVM!! Was this logical? What were major political parties doing when they would have taken a round of the center? Was it no their responsibility to raise questions about the space and arrangements?
Let us make some arithmetical calculation. If there were 1200 voters in a booth and 65% voted, it would mean 750 votes. But, with each vote taking 2-3 minutes, it would mean, in the 600 minutes (10 hours) available in the day, only 300-350 could vote in given 600 minutes. Naturally, this resulted in chaos. This means, even if voters want, more than 60% votes are simply impossible in current scenario, especially in a highly populated city with small polling centers. No doubt, many returned back frustrated, exhausted.
The arrangements were pathetic. There was no thought given to crowd movement. There was one queue that had a number of booths, of which 3 booths were crushingly over crowded while others were manageable. Till last elections, the booths used to be in open ground and one could walk in, check the booth numbers and stand in the right queue. The process would take around 30 minutes. This time till one entered though one narrow gate and squeeze past huge number of people in narrow corridors one wouldn’t know what is happening inside. This horrifying experience got further claustrophobic because the school was airconditioned in the classrooms and not the corridor, with low ceilings and no provision for fresh air. There was no arrangement of even water. A few nearly fainted. My wife went back without voting exhausted and went back after two hours to go back in queue again in the afternoon, again taking two hours.
The story was the same in Malad, Kandivali and Goregaon. I received messages from all over about such pathetic arrangements.
Second equally reprehensible and easily manageable issue is of missing names, which is another cause of frustration among voters. You may keep advertising about checking your names in the rolls, yes voters should. But, why should a list of last elections change and some names disappear? How can a family have some names missing while others are still there? Isn’t it a scandal? I don’t say that it is a scam or there is deliberate mischief. Not at all. I am just saying somebody is sleeping on the job. It is obvious that the EC is not using scientific data management tools in a digital India. If it were to do so, learning from Aadhar experience in handling big data, we would be saving thousands or millions of person hours that go into rechecking one’s name, filing forms again, EC making a fresh roll for each election and creating a mess.
There are errors galore like name appearing in one list in the polling officer's list but not appearing in the list on the help desk. There were mistakes in room number and serial numbers. Are we still stuck in 1980s computer era where you manually patch and update lists? Does it do our image any good that India is the IT powerhouse for the world but cannot manage its own voter lists? And by the way, can one help desk really support a polling centre with around 17000 votes?
Therefore, I think, we need to educate Election Commission teams and political party’s polling agents more than the voters. Will the Election Commission rise to the occasion? I concede that I am overawed by the sheer magnitude of our election process and the way it is handled by Election Commission. It is a global wonder. However, with better techniques and learning from our own experiences, we can surely do better.
Indian democracy is now populated with young voters who are ready to participate but are equally impatient. Voters are ready, but is Election Commission ready?