The curious case of the voter ID card: Good for everything but voting

Take a voter identity card. It has your photograph, your father’s or mother’s or husband’s name, your full address, date of birth with age at the time the card was issued, and the Assembly constituency of which you are a voter. The concerned returning officer’s signature and seal is affixed. What it lacks is your thumb impression and retinal image that the Aadhaar card required. There is a tamper-proof hologram as well. And yet, it is of no use to vote if your name is not on the voter rolls. That is, it has everything, including, a statement, ‘This card may be used as an Identity Card under different Government Schemes”. This should irk voters, not insignificant in number, who were turned away in Amravati, Pune and Mumbai from the polling booths during the Lok Sabha elections, perhaps in other places across the country. It raises a fundamental question: if you are not a voter, you wouldn’t have got the ID. If you had the ID, why are you not on the voter’s list? [caption id=“attachment_1497249” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] To a voter wanting to discharge his duty, this becomes a crisis. If an MP, Ram Jethmalani, who had used the same voter details to get elected in 2010 to the Rajya Sabha, could see him deleted from the list, imagine the plight of the rest. The number of such deletions is so large that this cannot be dismissed as a mere error that occured while the list was being updated. Errors cannot be on this scale. The precise number of such deleted voters is anybody’s guess but a figure of two lakhs for Mumbai and probably twice that in Pune are being bandied about in the public domain. Which means that even in an electorally lethargic city, if these people had voted, the voting percentages could have been better than the improved numbers. Questions arise because the voter list’s sanctity is critical to a fair election. TS Krishnamurthy, former CEC has in fact found this enough of an issue to ‘review’ and seek a better way to register voters. Speaking on a call-in programme on CNN-IBN, he admitted that there was room for improvement. Yes, keeping a proper electoral list is the responsibility of both the EC and the voter. He wondered why the process of issuing a show cause notice before deletion was not followed. When the EC itself was campaigning to increase voter participation, this poor status of the list was a surprise. In a country where in a first past the poll system candidates have won or lost by very narrow margins, deletions are a cause for grievance. In the 2004 Assembly polls in Karnataka, B Rachiah lost to R Dhruvanarayan by one vote. In 2008, CP Joshi, aspiring to be a CM, also lost by a single vote in Rajasthan. It is ironic that the ‘Voter’s ID’ as we know it, is actually an ‘Elector Photo Identity Card, which has been abbreviated by the Central Election Commission itself as EPIC. Scaled down voter’s rolls for whatever reason is unacceptable. After all, adult franchise is on the basis of one-man, one-vote. The perception is that one vote levels the voter and the candidate in a democracy. Of the several reforms due, the EC needs to focus on this first. It can’t be that despite having a voter’s card, one cannot vote. The IDs were issued during TN Seshan’s time to avoid impersonation which is a grave electoral offence. Technically the ID is a secondary condition, but in the popular mind it is a single condition since it is issued only to eligible and registered voters. I have voted since 1970 despite having changed residences and cities as often as, in a manner of speaking, changing into a clean shirt. However, I have never been stopped from voting for not having an EPIC. In the last two elections, with only a PAN card as an identifier of my voter credentials, I have voted although the system persisted in listing me in a building where I does not live. My wife has been listed in yet another apartment block. The fact is neither of us has been issued such a card, which is not for want of applying. After three previous votes cast, I found my photograph on the list yesterday, but the EPIC remains elusive despite applying twice to sort it out. When the card will arrive is no longer relevant, because it is not the EPIC but the PAN Card which helped me establish my credentials. The EC has to devise a way, such as possibly opting for smart cards with details embedded in them. Such cards will have to be renewed periodically, not just before the elections. Possession of such a valid card can mean automatic presence on the list via dynamic updating. This is not impossible. We are after all, a country which supplies techies to the world. After each elections, the Election Commission is viewed as being generally successful in conducting a free and fair elections but this remains unarticulated because by now, it is a given. Politicians may crib like Azam Khan did and rage like Jairam Ramesh saying it cannot “be a government” because of vigorous implementation of the model code of conduct. The raps on the knuckles are taken in the stride after apologising, like Sharad Pawar did after his ‘vote-twice’ call or Amit Shah after begging forgiveness for his “no-ball”. It can drive a Giriraj Singh into hiding till he seeks bail after poisonous diatribes. People may feel it is not enough but there is consciousness that the process is generally even-handed. But it needs to attend to this flaw of errors in the list because a deletion can amount to disenfranchisement even if unintended. Since the EPICs are not universal even after over two decades of issuance, they may even be done away with because, as of now, they serve no purpose except for other schemes. Save the money and get the act clean, including the lists.