{"id":5250,"date":"2011-08-28T13:55:43","date_gmt":"2011-08-28T17:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/?p=5250"},"modified":"2011-08-28T15:38:14","modified_gmt":"2011-08-28T19:38:14","slug":"proposed-electoral-reforms-for-india-and-its-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/archives\/5250","title":{"rendered":"Proposed Electoral reforms for India and its states"},"content":{"rendered":"

As per this report in Times of India<\/a> Anna and his team have further plans. One of those plans is "Electoral Reforms." Following is an excerpt from that report: <\/p>\n

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"We have to change the election system of the country… we have the right to reject," he said, adding that people should be allowed to use the option not to vote if they don’t like any candidate.
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I completely agree that "Electoral Reforms" is an important issue. I have thought about it for some time. Following are some of my thoughts.<\/p>\n

1. Holding Primaries<\/strong><\/u>: In the current system the party bosses have the ultimate say in terms of their candidates. So Sonia Gandhi, Nitin Gadkari, Sharad Pawar, Naveen Patnaik etc. have the ultimate say of their candidates in some faraway place in Odisha. How much sense does that make? Since it is extremely difficult to win as an independent, create a new party and run, or have a chance to convince existing parties and their boses to field you as a candidate,  it creates a huge barrier for someone to enter politics and get elected and as a result a very huge percentage of elected representatives are family members of past or current representatives. Also, often the situations arise when none of the candidates chosen by the party bosses are "good". To address these the best way is to introduce "primaries" or "preliminary elections" for all recognized parties. These preliminary election would then determine who the candidate of a particular party will be. Laws can be made to decide who can vote in these primaries. In US, in some states only party members can vote for the primary elections of that party and in other states there are open primaries. Open primaries is much easier to implement. So basically what will happen is before the election there will be another election where there can be multiple candidates of each party. As before everyone can only vote for one candidate total. After the primary elections the top voted candidate from each party goes on to the main election.<\/p>\n

2. Removal of the anti-defection law<\/strong><\/u>: The anti-defection law passed in 1985 as the 52nd amendment to the Indian constitution is a bad piece of legislation. Because of it MPs do not have the freedom to vote their conscience or vote as per the will of their constituents. They have to vote as dictated by their party leader.  This is extremely dangerous. The following illustrates it. Currently, if their is a single party with majority in Delhi it can pass whatever bill its boss wants. Now imagine someone is able to blackmail this boss. (Say the blackmailer possesses some document that can greatly harm the party boss.) This blackmailer can now pass whatever bill it wants. But abolishing the anti-defection law and allowing MPs to vote their conscience would mean government motions may fail resulting in the government being forced to resign under the collective responsibility principle. This is not desirable. So additional changes would be necessary to avoid this. See (5) below.<\/u>
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3. Provide mechanisms to recall an elected representative<\/strong><\/u>: If an elected representative is out-of-synch with the voters of his\/her constituency there should be a mechanism to recall that representative and have a new election. That way elected representatives can not forget their voters between elections and only show up around the election time. (Team Anna has mentioned this as one of their goals.)<\/p>\n

4. Government funding of election<\/strong><\/u>: Currently a big reason the elected representatives are corrupt is that they have to find funds for their election expenses. Many of them, though not personally corrupt, participate and if not participate then allow (and turn a blind eye) someone to raise funds (mostly in an illegal manner) for their elections. This can be avoided if government funds elections. Such a system is in place in the US; it allows a candidate to refuse this funding and use his\/her own funding.<\/p>\n

5. Direct election of CM and PM but with term limits of maximum of two terms<\/strong><\/u>: Came across the following suggestion of a  clever way to directly elect CMs and PM<\/a>. To that I will add that our CMs and PMs should have a term limit of maximum of two terms. This will allow for young leadership to emerge more easily.<\/p>\n

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… consider the idea of adding a single non-voting seat to every State Assembly and to the Lok Sabha. This single non-voting seat could have for its constituency all eligible voters within that State in the case of a State Assembly and similarly it could have all of the eligible voters in India in the case of the Lok Sabha. During elections this all-State or all-India constituency could go to polls along with the other legislative and parliamentary constituencies. The person who gets elected to this non-voting Lok Sabha or Assembly seat could be automatically considered to be the Leader of the House as he or she would be reflecting the collective will of all the voters of that Legislative Assembly or Parliament. Since the seat is a non-voting addition to the strength of the House this seat will not change the balance of power in the legislature which continues to be same as before.<\/p>\n

By virtue of being the leader of the House the person elected to the all-State or all-India constituency will have to be invited by the Governor or the President to form the next Government as the Chief Minister or Prime Minister. Irrespective of whether a party or a combination of parties has a legislative majority the Chief Minister or Prime Minister will have a fixed term which will be the same as the term of the legislature. Removal of the Chief Minister of Prime Minister would now require a higher legislative bar similar to a Presidential impeachment. The anti-defection law becomes redundant and irrelevant since the Government no longer depends on a simple majority in the legislature.<\/p>\n

In the absence of anti-defection laws, a cultural shift could be effected wherein legislators across party lines can think independently and come together to propose bi-partisan Bills in a manner similar to what we see in the United States. The Chief Minister or Prime Minister could then also have the additional freedom to appoint members to his Cabinet from outside the legislature thus eliminating another source of instability and dissidence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

6. Instead of "Right to Reject" allow "Write-in" candidates<\/strong><\/u>: The idea behind "right to reject" is that during voting there should be a option of "No One." This was suggested in a movie. In light of implementing 1-5 I don’t see any usefulness of this idea by itself. However, a better idea is to have a write-in option where people can write the name of the person (who is not in the ballot) who they want to vote for. So people can write "No one" if they desire so. Or they can write someone’s name. This is a good back-up if at last moment one of the candidate passes-away or if there is some major change (say a major movement like the current movement) and people want to vote for someone who is not in the ballot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As per this report in Times of India Anna and his team have further plans. One of those plans is "Electoral Reforms." Following is an excerpt from that report:  "We have to change the election system of the country… we have the right to reject," he said, adding that people should be allowed to use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[218],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-center-orissa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orissalinks.com\/orissagrowth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}