No absentee voting rights for domestic migrants till foolproof technology in place, says Commission

Noting that “there is an emergent need to link Aadhaar with the electoral details of voters”, the Election Commission of India has given a mixed response to the Supreme Court on providing absentee voting rights, like electronic voting and proxy voting, to over 300 million domestic migrants in the country, saying there is no foolproof mechanism to verify their identity and block duplicity.

Panel’s study

The top poll body had last year set up a committee to study the possibility of amending the electoral law to empower voters who have migrated to other States within the country.

The Supreme Court had asked the Election Commission to study the possibility on the basis of an application by an UAE-based doctor Shamsheer V.P., represented by advocate Haris Beeran, for electoral reforms to allow inter-State migrants voting privileges like postal ballot available to government servants.

After almost a year’s study, the Election Commission concluded that “domestic migrants” do not constitute a “uniquely identifiable and countable class.” It said there was no reliable information or documentation on the number of domestic migrants in the country. The last one on them is the 15-year-old 2001 Census data of 314.5 million.

Logistical nightmare

Any provision of absentee voting rights to the “loosely defined term domestic migrants” would become a logistical nightmare for the Commission, that is, for example, they are so spread out that an election in one Assembly constituency would mean electoral arrangements in 4,120 Assembly constituencies.

Besides, enforcement of Model Code of Conduct would suffer and the concept of level playing field would get defeated with national parties having an advantage over State parties.

It said multiple vernacular data and “varying patterns of spelling” and difficulty in ascertaining the date of birth of voters had given rise to multiple entries of voters.

“Several thousands of voters keep on changing their places of ordinary residence frequently making this task even more complex,” the Commission said.

It said thus there was a need to ensure that a voter was enrolled only once in the electoral roll by linking his Aadhaar number with the electoral detail.

The Commission, however, did not totally negate the idea of providing domestic migrants with absentee voting rights, saying it might be extended only to a small subset of migrants who formed an identifiable and countable class of electors not delinked from their present place of registration and only “temporarily absent” from their place of ordinary residence.