When Gul Asrani, an AGNI coordinator for Ward A, walked into polling booth 8 at the Dunnes Institute around 3pm at Colaba and asked for the negative vote form, the polling officer told him she had none.
When Gul Asrani, an AGNI coordinator for Ward A, walked into polling booth 8 at the Dunnes Institute around 3pm at Colaba and asked for the negative vote form, the polling officer told him she had none.
“She checked with all the other booths,’’ he says. Later in the day, Asrani received a call from the oficer, telling him she could take a handwritten application from him if he wanted to exercise his rights. “My point is that there must have been many voters who might not have been allowed to lodge their negative vote,’’ says Asrani. Complaints about not being allowed to cast their negative vote poured in all day. Joel Ribeiro, a DNA journalist, was told by the polling officer that he was not aware of anything like a negative vote. “Since there was a long queue, I did not want to waste time explaining to him and voted for someone instead,” he says.
In the past three years, the city has witnessed an increase in voters who have cast a negative vote. The concept was first tested in April 2004 Lok Sabha elections when a large number of voters’ names went missing from the electoral rolls. A parallel outcry from some voters was the absence of the facility of lodging a negative vote. These concerns were allayed in the October 2004 polls.
But this time the misses were more stark than ever, with few being allowed to register a negative vote. The procedure seems simple enough. First, there is no form. The voter simply has to sign the register, get the finger inked and inform the officer about not wanting to vote. Upon this, the officer has to write “refused to vote” in the register. That is all. If electronic voting machines are in use, they need to be activated, then deactivated and reactivated for the next vote.
Not everybody feels so strongly about this nouveau concept. A marketing professional, Rudra Sampat, doesn’t understand the idea behind negative voting. “If the citizens are so passionate about their rights, why don’t they put up good candidates and vote for them instead?’’ she says.
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