The Election Commission of India will take a leapfrog in its engagement with the electorate by looking into ways to include migratory population and increase involvement of transgenders, sex workers, labourers, homeless and persons with disabilities.
The Commission is working on ideas to have queueless voting by enabling voters to “book” a time of their convenience at the polling station or through email.
“This way, voters will be staggered and they can avoid queues...We may provide this facility between say 8 am and 3 pm,” Deputy Election Commissioner Umesh Sinha said at an interaction titled Role of Media for Inclusive Electoral Participation where he sought “newer suggestions” from the media.
The Commision would soon upload all necessary information on its portal. “It is ready and will soon be launched by the election commissioner,” Sinha said.
Significantly, the Commission is working on a project to make it possible for the migratory population to vote from the place where they move from time-to-time. A committee, headed by Sinha, was discussing the ways to work out a mechanism for it by understanding the phenomenon of migration of different communities. He said as yet there was comprehensive data on migratory population, “its quantification is not there..”, Sinha said.
On the question of foolproof nature of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), the official said “EVM is a time-tested machine and it depends on who is the looser and who is a winner..”.
The Commission’s portal has a record of 84 crore voters and each one of them (with full details) can be reached by a click of button.
He said it has been successfully in encouraging youths, particularly girls, to come to voting booth and thus bring down “urban apathy” towards the ballot.
To address gaps in electoral participation, the Commission had in 2009 rolled out a voter education programme which later came to be described as the Systematic Voter Education and Electoral Participation Programme (SVEEP).