May 23, 2023. Updated: Apr 11, 2024.

Part of "Bhārata, that is India" series

Elections in Bhārata

That, politics is the fight between good and evil is the biggest lie we have sold freely to people. The fight is not between good and evil; the fight is between evil and evil.

Stephen Nedumpally in Lucifer (2019).

All political parties have been angels and demons in their lifetime. So, voters cannot their vote on the account of immaculateness. The decision is largely based on which side outweighs the other side: the agreeable side of the political party or the non agreeable side. This ratio doesn't change among most people, especially when ideologies are involved. And with the human nature of tribalising and staying in their echo chambers, it is safe to say that the majority of the electoral roll is polarised.

Many political pundits blame a political side for polarisation. However, because polarisation constitutes two poles with views that are different if not opposite, the accountability for polarisation lie not with one side but with both sides. The other side is equally guilty in polarising people in ways suitable to them and often covertly.

As an example, the Hindutva factions are often blamed for religious polarisation in Bhārata, but the appeasement politics of the left that paved way for this religious polarisation is often overlooked. No force can polarise a group unless there is already an attack vector within the group — a premise which was already set or aggravated by a side.

When such premises are raised, it is accused of hate mongering. This accusation is so rampant that everything labelled as hate isn't hate at all. If the premise is not investigated and instead ignored with such labelling, the premise will take an emotional tone and will manifest later in undesirable ways. Such irresponsible labelling also normalises hate, much like the liberal labelling of people as anti-nationals normalises anti-nationalism. Thereafter, any true hateful remarks and positions will not receive the true attention it requires.

A risk of polarised electorate is that political parties can get away with corruption even if the corruption is out. Many voters prefer to have a government run by politicians or party that is accused or even convicted of corruption, than have a government run by politicians or a party with whom they don't share any values. We need a fall back party for each ideology, which can also act as a deterrent to the primary party against corruption and bad governance.

Single Event Elections

Elections are resource intensive processes that eat money, time and energy of the participants. The politicians may afford these resources, but all citizens may not. Such elections also give consistent governance period across all constituencies, which makes it easier to evaluate the governance of a nation as a whole. For these two reasons, it is sensible to conduct elections to all bodies in a single event spanned over few days if necessary.

Such elections does not violate federalism because they are not literally one election but rather many elections in a single event. The argument that national issues will dominate voters is misplaced for the same reason stated above, that we have many elections on that event. National issues can be considered for the national elections, state issues can be considered for the state election and regional issues can be considered for local body elections.

If the argument is that voters don't have the bandwidth to process such as massive size of issues and associate them with the right election, I disagree. Those who are loyal to a political side and only vote for that party all the time (which many are) doesn't need to process and associate issues with the corresponding elections. For them, this change will not matter. But those who actually consider issues and vote accordingly, do have the bandwidth to process and associate each issue with the corresponding elections.

In case if the right association of issues with the election isn't working (for humans have cognitive biases), we can modify the event from a single event to three events (national, state and local body) spanning over a month. This can still give the benefits of a single event: less cost (if election infrastructure and human resource is extended for the whole month without packing up after every election), and consistent governance period (assuming that all governments take effect only after the results of the third election).

The other concern with such election format is what to do when there is a need for by-election, such as in the case of death or resignation of a representative or if the government is defeated by a no-confidence motion. The answer lies on when this happened. If the term wasn't ending in the next 6 months or so, re-elect representatives or governments for remaining period. Otherwise, impose presidential rule for the rest of the period. One can argue that a re-election is resource intensive too and therefore defeats the very purpose of this new format (saving resources), one must remember that such incidents are rare, and therefore, the benefits of the new format will outweigh the disadvantages that comes with such rare events.

Voting Mechanism

Electronic and paper ballot voting have their pros and cons in terms of convenience, verifiability and tamper-ability.

On convenience, the process of casting and counting votes, especially in a populous and geographically large country like Bhārata, is humongous and tedious. Since machines can handle most of the repetitive work easily, and error prone work accurately, electronic voting beats paper ballots on convenience.

But the public has no way to verify the functioning and integrity of the voting machines (or their tamper-ability by internal forces) as it requires technical know how, and has to trust the election commission. This issue, however, doesn't seem to be a problem in practice because, even in the case of paper ballots, the citizens do not go and count the votes themselves to verify the results. They simply trust the election commission. In the event of an accusation, they trust their respective political players in whose presence the ballots can be counted. However, unlike the average citizen, political parties can afford the resources to verify the electronic voting machines (EVMs). Therefore, in practice, the verifiability of paper ballots over EVMs have no intrinsic advatange. In effect, both presents the same degree of verifiability.

On the feature of tamper-ability, both forms of voting are susceptible to being tampered by external forces; just that their attack vectors, the scale of damage, and their protection level are different. Because paper ballots are easy, accessible and requires less technical know how, more number of people can rig it. But the scale will be low; one has to rig the system at numerous places with massive trace back footprint to get massive advantage. On the other hand, EVMs, if rigged, can offer massive advantages with the least effort. However, because of the technical know how required, not everyone can attempt it. When you then consider the fact the it is easier to provide security to EVMs than boxes of paper ballots, the chances of outside interference is virtually nil.

Considering these pros and cons, an electronic voting system with machines vetted by the political parties on the day of elections and in front of the media is the best system to be adopted. It reflects the best of both worlds.

The voting machine can be retro fitted with a biometric verification system to prevent duplicate and proxy voting. If a client-server architecture is difficult to implement due to networking constraints, the hashed¹ biometric details can be stored locally too.

Political Alliances

Political alliances between political parties can form and break governments in a large nation like Bhārata. At times, political alliances are the reason why people vote for a particular political party too. For these reasons, it is necessary to have some rules and regulations with respect to political alliances.

Pre poll alliances formed between political parties must last till the next election if the alliance wins. This is because the politicians of the alliance asked for votes in the name of the alliance, and people voted for them considering the alliance. Therefore, post win, the players of the alliance must honour people's mandate and not use the win as a leverage for their personal political gains. In extenuating circumstances where the players disagree on governance and policies, they can pull out of the alliance. Such dissolutions can happen only after a reasonable amount of time into governance; not right after the poll.

After an election, the winning candidate must not defect to another party or alliance. This is because, although the voters technically vote for the individual, most of them cast their votes for the political party the individual belongs to. Therefore, when a winning candidate defects to another party post win or during incumbency, he or she is dishonouring people's mandate. If, for any reason, the incumbent representative wants to leave the party, he or she must relinquish the post elected and a by-election must be conducted.

Political parties must avoid post poll alliances as they are unholy and unfair since such alliances go against people's mandate. People who voted for an independent party voted specifically for that independent party. Had that party formed a pre poll alliance, all those who voted for that party may not have voted so because of the alliance. This is true otherwise too. Given this case, post poll alliance does not reflect the true mandate of the people.

When a party wins the majority in the election, it means that the majority wants that party to rule. Therefore, in the event when a winning party misses the majority mark required to form a government, it must ally with others to form the government. In such alliances, the integrity of people's mandate is still upheld with the winning party in power. If this is not possible for whatever reasons, conduct a re-election.