Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi on Sunday called for a ban on opinion polls and also suggested counting of votes from the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips instead of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and change in the appointment process of the Election Commission.
In his lecture on the need for electoral reforms organised by the Capital Foundation on the occasion of Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer’s birth anniversary, Mr. Quraishi said the EC had been a “powerful neutral umpire” and never missed a deadline for elections.
He said while the EC had set up campaigns for voter awareness to increase turnout and formed the expenditure monitoring division to check the use of money in elections, there was more to be done. “Criminals are ahead of the police. They come up with new modus operandi,” he said.
He flagged the problem of “criminalisation”, with 30%-40% of the members of any legislature having pending criminal cases. Among the reforms he suggested were changing the process of removal of Election Commissioners, who can be removed on the recommendation of the CEC while the removal of the CEC is by impeachment. “They [ECs] feel like they are on probation,” he said
The EC should have the power to de-register political parties, he said, adding that “there are lots of defunct and bogus parties” that only exist for “money laundering”. “Opinion polls should be banned. You have seen how they vitiate the purity of the election process,” he said.
He said the suggestion of counting from the VVPAT instead of the EVMs needs to be considered.
Mr. Quraishi also said there needs to be a debate on proportional representation . He said he changed his mind about the first past the post system after the 2014 elections when the Bahujan Samaj Party got 20% of the votes in Uttar Pradesh but no seats. The fact that 20% of the voters did not have a voice in the legislature was a defect in the system, he said.
