9 - Initiatives to Raise Voter Participation

Summary

Amidst the talk of electoral reform, there were appeals made by civil society that the EC should make efforts to educate voters (Proceedings of the Seminar on Electoral Reforms, 1985: 28). It was suggested that this could be done in different ways like broadcasting educative programmes and advertisements, publishing pamphlets, and so on, so that people can vote without fear or favour (Proceedings of the Seminar on Electoral Reforms, 1985: 28). As mentioned in the previous chapters, the EC made efforts to both encourage voters to exercise their ballot and modernise election machinery by introducing provisions like EVMs, photo identity cards for voters, computerised electoral rolls, and so on, for the convenience of voters and prevention of malpractices.

The EC put in a lot of effort to increase voter turnout from the decade of the 2000s. Its promptness in implementing rules and regulations brought forth the accusation that it has killed the festival of democracy. About this accusation, former CEC S. Y. Quraishi feels that it is only now that the festival of democracy has ushered in because voter participation has gone up, violence during elections has considerably reduced, the EC has ensured peace, and voters, especially women, are coming out in larger numbers to vote. It is said that elections in India are ‘carnivalesque’ and that this ‘carnival’ happens in more or less an orderly manner under the supervision of the EC (Banerjee, 2014: 10). The EC over the last few elections has made huge efforts to make the electoral process more participatory. A couple of years before the general elections in 2014, it went into an overdrive to register new voters and persuade existing voters to renew their names on the electoral rolls. More than 800 million people were eligible to vote in the 2014 elections. In addition to the conventional ways of spreading voter awareness, the EC used the upcoming media technologies to reach out to voters. It used messaging apps and social media platforms to persuade them to register themselves with it.

Efforts to Raise Voting

Institutional efforts were made to extend the system of universal adult suffrage, which was put in place by the Constitution of India through Article 326.