Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Improvements required to ensure maximum voting' that was published in Newsband

Improvements required to ensure maximum voting

Several lakh names of voters were missing from the electoral rolls in Maharashtra in the most recent phase of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. This was in spite of the introduction of latest information technology tools — like the one launched by the Election Commission of India. It was a national-level online ‘electoral roll search’ that could be used by voters even from their smartphones to search their names on the rolls.

Some people are of the opinion that the technology cannot be a substitute for care, verification and proper supervision of the process. Burgeoning urbanisation, with people frequently shifting residences, or large numbers of migrant workers moving to cities, calls for a great deal of care to ensure that all eligible voters are included.

Not only in Maharashtra, even in other states, this issue has come up. It feels odd that the citizen residing in the place for a long time is not there in the voters list of the largest democracy of the world. There are several people who couldn't exercise their legal right to vote and how can we consider the result of this election as a true opinion of the Indian Citizens??

The way ahead would be (a) Decentralisation - the information should be available from the villages to districts and (b) Centralisation - with the help of online technology for voters to verify and update their details. If we just do option (a), it would not serve the purpose for the urban and migrant voters and only option (b), would not help 600,000 villages of India. So we need the combination of both. And most importantly it must be EC's responsibility to ensure that all above 18 years are in the voter list - cross checking them periodically. They must be held accountable.

Voting should be made online in some cases so that the centralised database could be used to add the migrating people. The migrant should be removed from the previous constituency list and added to the new constituency.

In their own interest and as a small courtesy extended to voters, political parties can themselves playing a huge role in ensuring that voter rolls are up to date and mischievous acts like deliberate or selective deletion of voters does not take place. They have the manpower and the resources and it serves them well to have every bonafide voter be able to vote.