Few Statistics – For 2014 LS election 814 million voters have registered which is 100 million more than those registered for 2009 LS election. For 2009 election voter turnout was 58% and for 2014 LS election turnout is expected to be around 70% i.e 570 million approx. Even after registering there are around 244 million voters who will not come out and vote, forget about those who are eligible and yet have not registered themselves on the electoral list. 244 million is a huge number!!
While watching one of the commercials of the election campaign, which said “Nari ab sirf bahu nahi, bahumad ban sakti hai” (Women cannot only become good wives but also a major force to elect a good government),I could not stop myself from thinking that why so many women do not go out and vote. Same applies to students, middle and upper middle class businessmen and professionals. These are the categories which forms that 244 million mentioned above.
Answer – they genuinely want to exercise their voting right and want to elect a good government but according to them the entire process is very tedious. They cannot think of standing in a queue for 3-4 hours, leaving all their work, just to cast a vote which they think will not even make much of a difference in the outcome. It’s all in the mindset.
Solution – In sales management it is often taught, if the client does not come to you to buy the product then you go to the client to sell the product.Similarly if the voters are not coming out to vote then why can’t we provide them with the option of voting from their home using a computer or a smartphone?
POA (Plan of Action) – When a voter registers himself/herself on the electoral list, they will have to choose between – online voting or physical voting, and if they choose online mode then they will be provided with a user id and a password on the day of voting by an email or an SMS, which will be linked to their voter card number. A voter can use that id password and vote from their home.Once the voting is done the user name and password will expire and it cannot be used again to vote. Now these online voters cannot even go to the nearest polling booth and vote again as their voter card numbers are already captured and locked from voting again. For the above plan to be successful we will need a very strong IT base and servers so that there is no server crash. The entire system should also be hacker proof.The last thing we want is that the ID passwords are used by someone else to cast the votes. The online voting mode should be available only to the people who have an income above 3 lakhs and have the infrastructure to vote online like a smartphone or a computer. We do not want any political party arm twisting poor people to opt for online mode and then using their ID password to cast votes.
I know for online voting to become a reality, the Election Commission will have to overcome a lot of hurdles and cover a lot of loopholes. But the outcome will give us a government which will not be formed by luring poor people using baits like meals, alcohols and money but a true democratically elected body. I hope by 2024 the dream of Election Commission of a 100% turnout of voters is fulfilled.