NEW DELHI: The government is discussing the possibility of having a common electoral roll for the Lok Sabha, the assembly elections and the local body to avoid discrepancies and bring uniformity in the voter list, officials said Saturday.
Currently, the Electoral Commission prepares the electoral roll or voters list for Lok Sabha and the assembly ballot boxes. The state electoral commissions, which are completely separate bodies according to constitutional provisions, hold elections for local bodies such as municipalities and panchayats in their respective states on the basis of their own voter lists.
Various state election commissions use the draft EC voter list to formulate their own lists. The draft list of the EC is often divided into chambers for the elections of local bodies.
Now, the Center is exploring the possibility of having a unique voter list for Lok Sabha, assembly and local body polls, as this can help achieve uniformity and also save costs involved in a full repeating exercise to make separate voter lists, officials said.
There are provisions in the Constitution that empower states to formulate their own laws for holding panchayat and municipal elections. States also have powers to have their own voter lists or to adopt the one prepared by the EC for assembly votes.
“The government is discussing whether there can be a single electoral roll for these three types of elections. Now the states must be persuaded to adopt the central electoral roll (the one prepared by the EC),” explained a senior official.
According to another official, it is “desirable” to have a common electoral roll, since at present an entire exercise is repeated with the same purpose.
“The money is also spent twice in the same exercise. A list can also be good for the voters and there would be no discrepancies in the voter lists of the assemblies and local bodies,” he said.
Often, discrepancies have been observed when the names of voters are missing from one of the lists.
Earlier this month, the Prime Minister’s Office organized a meeting on the subject in which senior officials from the Ministry of Justice and the EC gave their views on the current state and future possibilities.
When asked if the proposed single electoral roll was linked to the idea of holding simultaneous elections, a government official said the two are not linked, as simultaneous polls generally refer to joint holding of Lok Sabha and assemblies. in the Indian context.
The Election Commission, the Law Commission and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Legal and Personnel Affairs have also supported the idea of a single voter list in the past.
In a letter written to the government in November 1999, the Electoral Commission had said that separate lists prepared by the EC and state ECs “not only create confusion among voters because their names may be present in one list but absent in the other, or vice versa, but they also lead to duplication of effort and expense. ”
In its report on Subsidy Demands (2016-17) of the Ministry of Justice, the permanent committee had also pointed out that, as of now, the EC and the state electoral commissions have separate electoral rolls.
“They carry out the voter registration and the update of the electoral rolls separately. The number of voters in their electoral rolls usually varies,” he had said.
.
