ELECTIONS

Kudos to the Parliament and the Government for passing the Lokpal bill today. It goes along with a bouquet of legislation to combat corruption, starting with the Right to Information Act. Though Lokpal is a powerful tool, we still need to address the causes of the disease of corruption - electoral funding! 1. The reality of direct elections today is that large sum of money is required to reach out to the electorate and provide them with democratic information relating to their electoral choices. The official limits upon election expenses are irrational, barely meeting the appropriate levels of expenditure and…

Chief Election Officer of Karnataka published a new version of Electoral Rolls on 3 November 2013, on his website. My observations here are limited to the electoral rolls of 28 constituencies of Bengaluru. Data quality of the rolls has improved compared with the version published in May 2013. 240 of the 370 voters below age 18 were infants at age 0 and age 1. They have all grown up and become 18 to 98 year old in the new list. Interestingly 57% of them are 23 year old now, ready to register in matrimonial sites. Did the AEROs check the…

  The state assembly election held in May 2013 saw people in Bengaluru coming out in large numbers to vote. There were 67.71 lakh voters on the voter roll, while population was 97 lakh in Bangalore. Everyone praised this as an achievement of election commission. However, were the voter rolls totally problem-free? P G Bhat, who is a retired naval officer and software professional, also an activist working towards quality voter rolls for some years now, traces the recent problems in Bangalore’s voter rolls. The 27 constituencies of Bangalore had more than 66.83 lakh voters in April 2012. Then as…

Online voter roll registrations in Beengaluru were closed for sometime, on September 26, 2013. Those who logged in to the Karnataka Election Commission website received a message, saying that the voter registration will reopen after the publishing of the draft electoral roll. Now it is that time of the cycle when the draft rolls will be out soon and registrations will re-open. Karnataka Chief Election Officer Anil Kumar Jha talks about the Election Commission's plans, in an interview with Citizen Matters. Voters registration was suppossed to be open from August 10 till November 11, 2013. Why did it close now?…

Only six states of the country have Legislative Councils in addition to Legislative Assemblies. Karnataka is one among them. Assembly and Council together form the legislature. MLCs have almost equal authorities, opportunities and responsibilities as MLAs. There have been several prominent ministers from the Council. Common man does not vote in legislative council elections. Legislative Councils have separate electoral rolls and constituencies different from Assembly Elections. 75 seats in legislative council of Karnataka are divided as: Teachers constituency - 7 Graduate constituency - 7 Nominated by Governor - 11 Elected by MLAs - 25 Local Authorities constituency - 25 Teachers'…

One of the banes of electoral rolls in the country is the rampant duplicate entries. Voter records are duplicated (a) within the same voter list, (b) in some other voter list within the constituency, (c) in other constituencies of the state or (d) in other states. For the past four years CEO-Karnataka has been telling that they have great software using fuzzy logic, capable of identifying all kinds of duplicates. CEO also told in February 2013 that his organisation deleted about 65,000 duplicate records identified by software and considered that there are no more duplicate entries. However, in the electoral…

The disturbing trend of 'criminalisation of politics' – which is simply or rather simplistically understood, as being the criminalisation of our elected representative bodies i.e., Parliament, state assemblies and other representative bodies - has engaged considerable attention of the Indian citizenry, for reasons that are too obvious to require any explanation here. When concerns around this issue were raised over a period of time, before the most important forum within the judiciary, the Supreme Court, some interesting pronouncements have come our way. Evidently, they have made an impact on the electoral process, even  though it is debatable whether such judicial…

Judging by the online discussions generated by citizens of Bengaluru, on the pros and cons of the agenda drawn up by the Bengaluru Political Action Committee(BPAC) it is clear that there are quite a few residents who are interested in finding solution to the multiple ills that beset the metropolis - from mounds of garbage to choked traffic and scams in every department of the administration. And since not everyone who is concerned about this degeneration makes online inputs, the number of citizens who would like to lend a hand with pulling Bengaluru out of the current mess, must be…

Here is a new government which has an opportunity to think long term as well as an opportunity to bring in far-ranging changes.In terms of infrastructure, there should be importance given to commuter rail issue. In the next one year, with the Centre and State having the same party running the governments, it is a good opportunity to try and push the issue in a concrete manner and get it into the railway budget and the system. The commuter rail system will have Bangalore develop in different ways along the railway tracks and allow for much more access for people…

After the Karnataka elections, many political analysts said that people of Karnataka are not for corruption; the BJP lost the state because of corruption. But did they? At least in Bengaluru, this argument does not seem to hold any ground. It is true that the rest of Karnataka voted out the corruption-ridden BJP. Outside Bangalore, the party got just 28 seats out of 196, and lost its deposit in 110 constituencies - a defeat unimaginable and unexpected by its leaders. But in Bangalore, BJP lost just five seats, down from 17 to 12. The Congress party suffered two upsets (Narendra…