Poll panel to overhaul voting system in 5 yrs

In order to tighten the country’s voting system, the Election Commission is planning to introduce one-person-one number system so that each person’s voter identity card number and unique identification number become one.

Updated on: Feb 6, 2011, 01:37:06 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In order to tighten the country’s voting system, the Election Commission is planning to introduce one-person-one number system so that each person’s voter identity card number and unique identification number become one.

The move is aimed at automatic deletion of duplicate names in electoral rolls and easy registration of new and migrating voters.

Work on merging the numbers has already started in Goa and the commission claims that the entire country will be covered in three to five years. There are about 730 million voters in India, and about 65% of them have voter identity cards.

Chief election commissioner SY Quraishi told HT there was another proposal for straightening the voting system: an instant paper receipt from an EVM (electronic voting machine), assuring the voter that his vote has been delivered to the candidate of his choice.

The commission has appointed a team of five IIT experts to have small printers attached to EVMs to produce a receipt of the vote cast without disclosing the identity of the voter.

The voter will only be able to see the receipt, which will be dumped into a sealed box. All the receipts will be destroyed once the voting gets over.

But Quraishi said the demand by some political parties, including the BJP, to make the paper trail verifiable later was “dangerous” and unsafe for the voter.

After his party’s debacle in the 2009 general elections, BJP leader LK Advani had questioned the efficacy of the 1.4 million EVMs used in poll. Also, Hyderabad-based NetIndia’s founder Hari Prasad had demonstrated on television how an EVM could be manipulated.

The EC rejected the claim, saying the situation in a polling station was totally different from that in a television studio.

Avoiding duplication

One-person-one-number is aimed at automatic deletion of duplicate names in electoral rolls and easy registration of new and migrating voters

EC also plans to attach small printers to EVMs so as to give voters a receipt for their ballots

There are 730 million voters in India with 65% of them holding voter identity cards

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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