A key Law Ministry recommendation for an amendment to the Conduct of Election Rules to protect the identity of voters has been pending for nearly four years.
The existing Rules permit tallying of votes by individual Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) at the polling station, rendering the voters of the area vulnerable to backlash by supporters of candidates.
The Ministry’s Legislative Department had, in a background paper on ‘electoral reforms’ prepared in collaboration with the Election Commission in December 2010, listed the recommendation as one of the key measures to ensure that voters exercised their franchise without fear or favour.
“The Election Commission recommends that an amendment be made to the Conduct of Election Rules to provide for the use of the ‘totalizer’ for counting of votes cast at more than one polling station where EVMs are used, so that the trend of voting in individual polling station areas does not get divulged and the electors may not be subjected to any harassment or victimization on that account,” it had said.
The issue of electoral reforms has been a subject of debate for several decades. Most of the recommendations made by numerous government committees continue to be on paper due to lack of consensus among political parties.
Some of these committees are the Goswami Committee on Electoral Reforms (1990), the Vohra Committee Report (1993), the Indrajit Gupta Committee on State Funding of Elections (1998), the Law Commission Report on Reform of the Electoral Laws (1999), the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (2001), the Election Commission of India – Proposed Electoral Reforms (2004) and The Second Administrative Reforms Commission (2008).
