VOTER LISTS & ELECTION TURN-OUT

The Starting Point in a Democracy

While there are important electoral reforms required in the country, such as candidate disclosure and affidavits and barring candidates with criminal records, the starting point for citizens in participating in the representative democratic landscape, is the ability to cast their vote. In an aggregate democracy like ours, high voter turnout is critical, especially in electing the local corporator where the margin of victory is sometimes as low as three votes. This programme is focused on elections from the viewpoint of the citizens.

C.I.V.I.L.

Voting is the First step in the Democratic process. It gives him the voice in the government through his representative. India is considered to be the largest Democracy in the world with around 600 million [60 Crore] in the Voters’ List. The Voter turn out in India is at an average of 60–65%. The voter turn out is satisfactory when we compare ourselves to the other countries in the world. But the truth is our Voters’ List itself is not correct. While it has many errors in it, the one which concerns us the names which are supposed to be theirs and which are not supposed to be there in the list. When we combine the voter turn-out and the error rate, it is very clear that our representatives are representing the minority population and not the majority of the population. It is very rare in India that a winning candidate gets more than 50% of the polled votes. Therefore it becomes very critical to have a flawless Voters’ List, where we have our representatives winning by as low as 1,2 or 3 votes. It can’t go below this.

For Janaagraha it is a very important issue, with Local Govt. as the focal point. It is in this regard the CIVIL[ Citizen’s Initiative on Voters’ Identification List] was born. The programme aims at correcting the voters list for Bangalore Mahanagara Palike Area as a short term measure, keeping in mind the up coming elections to the Local Council Elections in Nov. 2006. But at the heart of it we are looking for a long term solution through Area Sabha, where the Voters’ List is updated on a regular basis. This brings the Voters’ List to the citizen’s door step and he/she has access to it at any point of time, rather than looking at it during the time of elections.

The CIVIL was officially launched on 15th April, 2005 by the then Chief Election Commissioner Sri TS Krishnamurthy by doing survey in two houses. CIVIL is part of VoteIndia, a national campaign for political reforms, which is being spearheaded by Lok Satta and in Partnership with the Election Commission of India. As a pilot the programme has been taking up in Rajajinagar Assembly Constituency which has over 3 lakh registered voters, 252 polling booths. The process of verification of the voters list is very simple and straight forward but a very intensive one. The work involves three stages
1. Pre Survey
2. Survey
3. Post Survey
The Pre Survey involves all the preparatory work like procurement of Voters List, preparing the booth maps and the initial analysis of the voters list. The volunteers are trained to carryout the survey.
The survey is done door-to-door. A survey block carved of booth is allotted to a team of two. The volunteers on visiting the individual houses records the names of the people who are eligible to vote and residing in that particular house along with the mandatory fields like age, sex etc. in the Resident Form. They obtain the signature of one of the resident in the form and also get the Form 6, for inclusion of names if any in that particular house. Once the survey is complete, the names in the Resident Form are tallied with the Voters’ List in that particular Booth. If the Names are not found, Form 6 will be obtained going back to those houses again. After the completion of the verification process, the list of names along with the relevant forms for additions and deletions will be given to Election Commission for necessary action.