Combing the electorate

N gopalaswami
Chief Election Commissioner

The election to the Bihar Assembly held in October-November ’05 attracted nationwide attention and appreciation because of an extraordinarily peaceful poll - also perceived to be the fairest by far. Naturally, one would be curious to know the directions set by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the steps initiated to manage the poll.

The first pre-requisite for a free and fair poll is a clean and up-to-date electoral roll. What made the difference this time, in Bihar, was that with the rolls available in electronic form, along with tech-savvy officers, the Commission could direct electronic scouring of the rolls for duplicate names and suspicious entries.

An exercise was done to compare the mid-term population figures of citizens of more than 18 years of age with the total of electors in the electoral rolls and identify the districts, talukas and villages showing conspicuous deviation and therefore, requiring close scrutiny. A software programme generated a list of households showing more than 10-15 voters. And these were also verified to eliminate the names of dead and migrated voters.

The above steps — combined with the use of photo-matching software — helped elicit duplicate entries from the EPIC (Electoral Photo Identity Card) records and these were then field-verified.

The net result was that 18.31 lakh names we re-deleted from the rolls and with the addition of 4.83 lakh new voters, the net reduction amounted to 3% of the total electorate of the state. More importantly, this eliminated a big source for bogus voting.

The second step was the Commission’s ‘No EPIC, No Vote’ directive making voter identification mandatory through photo I-Cards thus minimising the chances for impersonation. This was combined with a campaign to increase EPIC coverage.
This directive combined with frequent monitoring helped raise the state’s average of EPIC coverage from 57% to 84% with some constituencies achieving 90-95% coverage.

The ECI directive to produce EPIC at the booth on the day of the polls helped eliminate the less reliable and more manipulation-prone documents being used as proof of identity. It was gratifying to see on poll days, in most visuals in the electronic and print media, electors complying with the directive and proudly displaying their EPIC while awaiting their turn to vote.

The directive of the ECI to arrest those covered by non-bailable warrants helped keep a check on criminals. For the poll day, the directive was simple and clear: “No CPMF, No EVM for Poll”. This effectively stopped any attempt at ‘idling’ the force given, which was a familiar complaint in the earlier polls.

The designation of a polling station as ‘sensitive’ is always a contentious issue between the different political parties who try to influence the local administration leading to allegations of bias.

This time, under ECI direction, the team consisting of Bihar’s Chief Electoral Officer NK Sinha and Deputy Election Commissioner Anand Kumar worked out a list of sensitive polling stations for each constituency.

They used past electoral data, pattern of voting and margins of victory and fine-tuned it with inputs from other field sources about vulnerable areas and past poll-related crime records.

Thus, the final list of sensitive booths left very little scope for last minute manipulation under political pressures.

The changes made by the ECI in spreading the polls - holding polls on seven days instead of the originally announced four days, helped raise armed police cover to almost 100% and eliminated any booth capturing.

Repolls, too, came down substantially, from about 1,764 in February-March, ’05 Assembly elections, to 301 in the October-November, ’05 elections.

The ECI’s no-nonsense approach in directing transfer of poor performers or partisan officials and inducting efficient and neutral officers, sent the right signals to the bureaucracy to perform without fear or favour.

The constant monitoring and frequent visits by the Commission itself, posting a pointsman in advisor KJ Rao, who was the public face supervising the polls, helped create the right atmosphere for a fair and violence-free poll. The strong stand taken by the SC and many High Courts in poll-related litigations has strengthened the ECI’s hands.

Another good augury is that the emergence of the civil society groups and the vigil mounted by a proactive media that will certainly help improve the quality of the polls.

But all these can lead to achieving ECI’s goal of a free and fair elections only if the ECI itself constantly evolves to meet new challenges and acts without fear or favour. A thing which the ECI amply demonstrated while holding the second Bihar polls.