E-Paper
EC for making paid news poll offence
Top ECI officials also urged legislative secretary G Narayan Raju to make suitable changes in the law to link voters list or electoral rolls with Aadhaar numbers. Such linking, ECI officials say, will eradicate duplicate entries.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) held discussions on Tuesday with the legislative affairs wing of the Union law ministry and made a fresh push for electoral reforms, including making paid news and filing of false affidavits electoral offences.
Top ECI officials also urged legislative secretary G Narayan Raju to make suitable changes in the law to link voters list or electoral rolls with Aadhaar numbers. Such linking, ECI officials say, will eradicate duplicate entries.
Chief election commissioner Sunil Arora and election commissioners Sushil Chandra and Ashok Lavasa interacted with Raju, an official statement released by the ECI said.
To link Aadhaar with the electoral rolls, necessary amendments would have to be made to the Representation of People’s Act. ECI has already written a detailed letter to the law ministry on the changes. ECI officials said the law ministry is yet to revert on the proposal.
ECI also pitched for having more than one qualification date in a year for a person to become a voter. Under the present rules, January 1 is the only date every year for a person to qualify as a voter. Multiple dates, ECI says, will enable more people turning 18 to apply to become voters throughout the year.
ECI also pressed to make electoral laws gender-neutral for armed forces personnel. At present an army man’s wife can enrol as a service voter but a woman army officer’s husband cannot. A bill that proposes to replace the term wife with spouse, making the provision gender-neutral, lapsed following the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha.
During the meeting, the chief election commissioner stressed the fact that more than 40 proposals of electoral reforms have been pending with the ministry for long. The crucial ones that are pending iclude making filing of false declarations a ground for disqualification and limiting the expenditure in legislative council polls. ECI wants bribery during he poll period a cognizable offence so that a magistrate’s permission is not required to investigate a complaint.
Filing of false declaration, at present, is punishable with six months in jail. ECI, however , is keen to make it an electoral offence as a conviction under the election law serves as grounds for disqualification.
