Make voting a must

On the same day that Mumbai registered a poor voter turnout, and exactly a week after Bangalore’s youngsters stayed away from the booths, LK Advani advocated the idea of compulsory voting. Anti-democratic, said some. Use of force unfair, said some others.

The Left’s complaint was an original one. “Not an original idea, it has been advocated earlier,” it said.

I think it’s an idea whose time has come. Not because it’s the best way to get voters out — we’d much rather they came out on their own — but because Indian democracy will be seriously damaged if turnouts continue to fall at this rate. And also because, given the nature of India’s politics and public involvement in it today, it has the potential to bring about much-needed reforms both within the political system and outside it and to actually transform the relations and the dialogue between India’s political parties and its people.

In the first place, it will make our Parliamentary system more representative in character. How? Let’s see the system as it exists today. Assume that you are a candidate in a constituency that has 40 voters, out of which 22 do not vote (the turnout is 45 per cent), and of the remaining 18 votes, you get 4, another candidate 3, two candidates get 2 each and seven other candidates get one vote each. You have got merely 22.22 per cent of the total votes polled, and you become the “people’s representative.”

This has been the reality ever since independent India first went to the polls in 1952. A must-vote rule can be a corrective: if 90 per cent or more voters turn up, we could have real people’s representatives (at least till we don’t bring in a rule that a candidate must get a certain percentage of votes to be declared elected).

The first-past-the-post rule has spawned other ills. As most voters won’t vote, a candidate can play the communal/caste card and mobilise voters of one particular group. By doing this, parties actually “generate a turnout” in the worst sense of the term. Compulsory voting will mean that if 30 per cent of voters in a constituency belong to one group and 70 per cent to other groups, a candidate can’t rest easy by exploiting narrow agendas: the majority of voters can reject him/her.

Politicians don’t need all the voters now because the current system suits them best. They will be forced to engage with voters if voting is mandatory. The beginning of such a dialogue could force parties to take a fresh look at their policies and programmes.

After all, there’s a huge risk now. Since voters will be going to the booths anyway, they may want to find out which candidate/party best reflects their interests and vote accordingly. If this happens, this very finding-out exercise could stir up voter interest in politics and the political system itself.

Those who still don’t like any candidate could choose the ‘none of the above’ option. This option too would have become a potent one. Parties would want to cultivate such voters out of concern that some of them may choose their rivals the next time round. If a large number of votes are invalid, that in itself is a message; but the bigger fear would be, what if voters decide they won’t always make their vote a statistic but make it count?

All this means much greater persuasion of the electorate than we see now, and that’s not bad in a country where the disconnect between the political class and the people is almost complete.

We have done enough neta-bashing already. But are politicians always the problem, and not the people? Why do we need compulsory voting when healthy turnouts can bring about all the above changes?

Well, simply because the time to give voters the benefit of doubt is over. Disillusionment is understandable as it reflects unhappiness with the choices available. What we are seeing is not just that. In many areas of Mumbai, V-day was seen as the first day of a long weekend; in Bangalore, all the music intended to inspire young voters fell flat; and as usual, the most affluent areas in urban centres led from the front in abstentions. For youngsters who hold candles and organise protest marches, recently-retired CEC N Gopalaswami had an interesting fact to offer: 70 per cent of those in the age-group 18-25 didn’t register themselves on the rolls.

Voters will have to be told now that voting is as much a duty and a responsibility as it is a right. This right was not acquired easily by Indians, as one assumes those with a couldn’t-care-less attitude would have read in their school/college textbooks.

The punitive action for those who still don’t turn up should not be harsh; indeed, it isn’t in the more than 30 countries that have enforced voting. They mostly slap fines, and — to answer the Left’s legitimate concerns about those who’re ill  — they allow the ill not to attend. There’s a cynical view that Indians would rather pay up than vote, but we’ll know only if we try.

In ‘must-vote’ countries, there hasn’t been much talk of violation of democratic rights either. Turnouts, however, have been healthy (a good example is Australia), people know they can’t take their vote for granted, and parties know they can’t even take their core voters for granted.

Advani has made a good suggestion, and a socially conscious actor, Aamir Khan, has also pushed for it. Let us start a debate on the subject. Who knows, if discussion on it is robust — including by those opposed to it — that debate itself could generate interest among uninterested voters.