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A NOTE FOR ELECTION REFORMS IN INDIA BY Shri. VASANT T. KADAM
I have a novel idea to share with the people of India and especially The Election Commission. This I am talking about the Election Reforms .I have this idea from my experiences of the number of elections I have personally attended to as the election officer. It is Mandatory for the Government Servants to work on election duties. The author is working with the Government of Maharashtra since last 28 years and as Gazetted Officer for more than 10 years now and has participated in the number of elections.
In the general elections before the use of the Ballot Machines we were using the Ballot papers. This was too expensive, therefore the new system is introduced that of Ballot Machines. Besides these machines there are other expenses of booth building, barricading, manning the security personnel’s. These expenses are paid for three days to fifteen days depending upon the election schedule. And even after doing this we find most of the people do not vote at all. Even some of the colonies are barred by some miscreats from voting.
I have a simple solution to all these problems. Elections to be carried out by a touch screen. And such touch screen booths to be located at railway stations, Malls, public places, etc where a common man can have the access. Only it is to be seen that at a time only one person enters the booth. And these touch screen machines with the capability to take the photograph of the person voting will prove a good measure to stop the bogus voting. Only election commission and the courts can have access to these details if it there is any exigency. The touch screen machine will open the ballot paper as soon as a person touches the screen and he or she can vote according to his or her choice. If the person is handclapped by hand then only in that case he/she can be made to vote with the help of election officers as we are doing that even today for the Blind and other citizens. There is no need to put even the ink on the figure. If this is there no body will come to know if anybody has ever voted or not and there will not be any harassment to him/her to vote for a particular party or the person. The voting ballot paper will be available on touch screen over the internet throughout India. Any person can vote from anywhere for his/her constituency. That means if a person residing and having registered as Chennai Voter can vote in Delhi if he is there in Delhi for his/ her constituency of Chennai. When the person touches the screen his /her ballot paper of the area he/she is residing will automatically pop-up the screen with the choices. This measure will bring voting 99% to 100%.Instead of doing election on a specific date at specific area elections can be done for a week or so. In this process security will be required only for the machines.
I know for sure that to complete the election according to this process we need to have the data of the voter in the bio-metric form. There is long discussion going on for the national identity cards. These identity cards with bio-metric samples such as fingerprints, eyes etc will be required to be given to the voters. There is cost of making these identity cards and after that there are no expenses as are going on today. For the knowledge of the readers I may mention here that the huge amount we spend on elections has no audit. The amount of money we spend for elections is a huge amount and probably not affordable to poor people of this country.
The measures suggested above will definitely curtail the cost of election more than 80%.and even the result of the election counting will not take the time as today even after using the ballot machines.
I hope lot of people read this and make aware of this article to others. This is sincerely what you will be doing for the betterments of this country and the people of this country. I hope election commission will take it seriously and try to evaluate the idea because it will reduce the corruption in politics as well.
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