Venkatesh Nayak wakes up every morning thinking someone somewhere is hiding something
Two weeks ago, the Election Commission (EC) dissed the claims made by Vote for Democracy, a citizen action platform, about enormous discrepancies in the voter turnout figures announced for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. When the Indian National Congress, the largest Opposition party in Parliament, questioned the variance between the initial and final polling statistics, which is apparently more than 4.5 crore votes, spread across at least 79 parliamentary constituencies, the EC called it a “false campaign” being run to discredit the polls. Later, another electoral reforms advocacy group, the Association for Democratic Reforms, pointed to the significant discrepancy between the number of votes cast through the electronic voting machines (EVMs) and what was eventually counted on them. The EC has maintained a stony silence on this issue.
Ironically, in recent times, the country’s election management body has repeatedly patted itself on the back for conducting the freest and fairest of elections of all times and anywhere in the world. In fact, on the eve of counting, the Chief Election Commissioner publicly assured us that he had issued instructions to all Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs), District Magistrates, Superintendents of Police and Observers to ensure transparency in the counting process “according to the rules”.
Despite all these assurances, EC officials continue to deny access to crucial information that can enable citizens to ascertain for themselves the veracity of the election results. After all, it is not enough for the EC to merely certify that the elections were free and fair, the voters must be able to ascertain that themselves. Unfortunately, there is not enough information in the public domain to be able to do that.
When the EC refused to make public the absolute voter turnout data of the initial polling phases and expected us to be content with polling percentages, I filed four RTI applications (staggering them according to the number of polling phases completed) seeking voluntary web-based disclosure of the mandatory reports which Returning Officers (ROs) submit on the morning after polling day. This report, countersigned by the EC’s Election Observers (EOs) after scrutinising poll documents, contains crucial data such as the total number of registered voters in the constituency, how many of them actually cast their votes through the EVMs, how many postal ballots were issued and how many were actually used, the number of EVMs that were used and how many defective ones were replaced, etc.
The RO is also required to report the number of voters who were allowed to vote on the basis of their EPIC cards and others who used other permitted identification documents, the number of voters placed on the absentee, shifted and dead list (ASD), the number of people on this list who were allowed to vote after verifying their identity, the number of proxy votes, tendered votes and challenged votes cast lawfully, and the number of voters who refused to press the ballot button despite registering themselves at the polling booth. At the bottom of this report, the signatories are required to indicate whether any incident of violence occurred or the poll was interrupted for any reason and if they recommend repoll in any polling station.
The EC rejected the RTI applications stating that I was only seeking clarifications and not ‘actual information’. These common replies came despite my citing the paragraph number where these reports are mentioned in the EC’s Handbook for ROs. When I appealed these decisions, the EC shockingly claimed that it does not have this information and that I must approach the ROs directly. In another reply, the EC claimed that revealing the reports would endanger the life of a person or unmask the source of information it receives in confidence for law enforcement purposes! These replies came disregarding the fact that these reports must be available for public inspection and copies must be supplied to any requestor under the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961. They are not sarkari secrets.
That is not all. Before counting day, when I researched the CEO websites, for the list of ROs in those states, only seven states -- Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Jharkhand – and the Union Territories of Delhi and Puducherry had displayed them. So, when I filed a fifth RTI application asking for the complete list of ROs across the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies, the EC again said that it does not have it and that I must approach the CEOs separately. Under the election-related law, it is the EC which appoints the Ros, in consultation with the respective state governments. To claim that it does not have a compiled list is astonishing. This begs the question, did the EC never contact the ROs across the country during the elections?
In April this year, a couple of weeks after announcing the election schedule, the EC proudly launched an online ‘Myth v Reality’ register to combat what it called “mis-information” about the elections. Here the EC counters people’s and civil society’s claims and complaints about problems plaguing the EVMs and VVPATs, the electoral rolls, and the actual conduct of elections, among other things. The EC could do itself a favour by using this segment of its website to publish actionable information like it used to a decade ago -- such as voter turnout data in Form 17C and the vote-count data in Form 20 for all polling stations, along with the ROs’ ‘morning-after reports’ from all constituencies. Many doubts about the truth of the election results could be set to rest by publishing such information for the voters, whom the EC is both constitutionally and statutorily mandated to serve.