What Team Anna is missing on poll reform

It is safe to say Anna Hazare has never heard of Kuttiamma. The cashew nut factory worker was inconsolable on the day Kerala went to elections in 1991. Her name was missing in the voters list in the Mavelikkara constituency. A vote for the Congress candidate would have been a slap on the wrist of her daughter-in-law, a CPM activist. A show of defiance. But it was not to be.

Kuttiamma died three months after the elections. Her name never made it to the voters list. The debate over electoral reforms has all of a sudden come alive after Anna Hazare and his team announced their plan to pursue the introduction of recall of candidates in the voting system.

Law Minister Salman Khurshid told ET (Saturday, September 3) the government is preparing an ambitious law to bar individuals named in criminal chargesheets from contesting elections. Will it work? Is the right to recall feasible? Truth is agreeing on the infirmities of the election system and remedies have seldom yielded simple answers.

In Bangalore, Janaagraha, a civil society organisation, has been working for years to ensure that people like Kuttiamma exercise their right to vote. The organisation's MoU with the Election Commission last year for a project titled Bangalore Electoral System Transformation, or BEST, looks to increase voter registration and eliminate errors of omission, commission and spelling mistakes in electoral rolls. The pilot project in Shanthi Nagar, a constituency of 2 lakh voters, found that 60,000 names have to be transposed, 45,000 have to be added and another 30,000 have to be deleted.

Vote For Voting

The findings will be officially announced on Monday. Ramesh Ramanathan, co-founder of Janaagraha, says his organisation is looking to change the way voter rolls are generated in India. "We want to extend the MoU with the EC and take it across India."

In Delhi, the Association of Democratic Reforms along with National Election Watch work with at least 1,000 other partners to improve the electoral system. On top of the organisation's to-do list is educating citizens about candidates. "People at the grass roots should be informed about a candidate's background and assets," says ADR director Trilochan Sastry.

Complementing these efforts is the Central Election Commission. Tales of booth capture and bogus votes, once rampant, are seldom told anymore. The focus has shifted to the selection of candidates and campaign finance.

Politicians, too, have been doing their bit. Earlier this year, the government raised the spending limit for candidates in the assembly polls to Rs 16 lakh from Rs 10 lakh and Rs 40 lakh from Rs 25 lakh for the Lok Sabha elections. The Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, 2010 on August 31, 2010 allows the place of residence as mentioned in a passport to determine which constituency a citizen can get enrolled in. Prior to that, the Representation of the People (Second Amendment) Bill, 2008 that banned exit polls was passed.