Show what you do & how: A reshuffle won’t fix Election Commission, only trustworthiness that it can demonstrate will

Paris: This week's editorials on the conduct of Election Commission of India, the steady stream of reports on the chaos unleashed by special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and The Indian Express' landmark investigation into the inner workings of EC over the past year all point to the same conclusion: India's once most respected institution has dug itself into a deep hole.

The question now is how it will climb out of it. And how its shattered credibility can be rebuilt. Institutions take decades to build and moments to wreck. Rebuilding one that has lost the public is harder still. Bill Gray, a former Australian electoral commissioner, put it bluntly: losing trust is 'brutally simple and often fatal'.

A useful starting point is political scientist Pippa Norris' distinction between trust and trustworthiness. Trust is citizens' subjective judgement about whether an institution will act competently, fairly and in public interest. Trustworthiness is the institution's actual performance - its competence, integrity, impartiality and responsiveness - which gives citizens metrics for such judgement.


In short, trust is what citizens think; trustworthiness is what institutions demonstrate. The two can diverge. A competent institution can be distrusted, and an undeserving one trusted. The democratic goal, then, is not to maximise trust, but to make an institution's trustworthiness visible enough for citizens to judge it for themselves.

Herein lies EC's difficulty. Historically, it ran on trust, rather than demonstrated trustworthiness. Public faith in the commission - and, by extension, in elections - reposed on the reputation of its commissioners. It required no transparency, scrutiny or accountability, merely the belief that a few good men were doing their job without fear or favour.

Successive commissioners have resisted openness, treating scrutiny as unnecessary, or even improper, for an independent body. That model has now collapsed. Not only has the commission lost public confidence, but recent events have also left citizens with no reliable way to ascertain whether it deserves that confidence.

The answer, therefore, is not simply to reshuffle commissioners and hope that better individuals will restore the old faith. Future commissioners will have to do more than reassert the commission's independence. They will have to change its bureaucratic culture, so that trustworthiness is demonstrated rather than assumed.

Part of the remedy lies beyond the commission's reach. Confidence in commissioners has eroded ever since the executive injected itself into their selection, replacing the Chief Justice of India on the selection panel with a Union minister nominated by the PM. In this configuration, commissioners come under suspicion even before taking a single decision. Parliament must adopt a selection method that the losing side cannot credibly call partisan.

Within its own walls, however, the commission cannot restore confidence through sterner denials, more press releases or appeals to take its word for what happened behind closed doors. It must make its decision-making visible. Five relatively straightforward reforms would go a long way:

Major decisions should come with a public decision trail. For an exercise as consequential as SIR, the commission should publish not only the final order but the evidence behind it, the legal and administrative alternatives considered, the principal objections raised, and reasons for choosing one course over another.

Roll revisions should become independently auditable. The commission already holds vast quantities of data on additions, deletions, objections, appeals and restorations. It should release them systematically, in machine-readable format, with clear definitions and consistent reporting standards.

Citizens should be able to see not merely that voters were removed but why, how many challenged their exclusion, how many were restored, and how long the process took.

Dissent should be documented, rather than concealed. When commissioners disagree on an important decision, the public should eventually learn what the disagreement was about, and how it was resolved. Courts have long recorded dissenting opinions without weakening the authority of their judgments. An electoral body can do the same.

The commission needs stronger external scrutiny. Political parties, journalists, researchers and civil society organisations should have predictable channels for obtaining data, challenging procedures and asking questions. Independence should mean freedom from political interference, not freedom from scrutiny.

EC must recognise that communication is not transparency. A press conference tells citizens what an institution wants them to know. Transparency lets them examine the basis on which it acted.

None of this requires heroic commissioners. And that is precisely the point. An electoral body whose credibility rests on the character of a few individuals is always one bad appointment away from crisis, as the past year has shown. One whose workings are open to inspection can survive its commissioners' failings, because its errors are visible and corrigible.

The real test of an election commission is not whether winners praise it, but whether losers accept their defeat. For decades, EC passed that test on borrowed trust. That credit is now exhausted. Unless the commission earns it back with transparency, the next close verdict may be one the losing side will refuse to accept. And no reshuffle can repair that.