The Negative Vote

Decentralisation of power is a powerful concept and democracy does it take it to its ultimate logical end. By allowing the people to be governed to decide who will govern the community. Asking a person, what he wants and by whom we wants to be governed, is respecting the basic dignity of human being and respecting her/his innate intelligence. But, quite clearly even if we are voting intelligently individually, we are not voting intelligently collectively. The power that the voters were supposed to have wielded is practically non-existent. The political parties have been able to use a combination of charisma, lineage, fear, ‘inducement’, caste, alliance arithmetic, poll management, information inefficiency, to get candidates with dubious credentials get elected. As a result sometimes ineffective governments have returned to power [Left Bloc in West Bengal for 20 years] or the relatively effective governments given way to a less effective dispensations [there are many examples in the past 30 years, Kalyan Singh – UP, PV Narasimha Rao – Centre, Atal Behari Vajpayee – Centre, etc].    

Quite inevitably, there are strident demands to change our election system. The Right to Reject, The Right to Recall – being two such changes mooted; wherein re-elections would need to be held if unacceptable candidates are fielded or if the elected candidates do not deliver. The Right to Reject and Right to Re-call, are essentially the call to give power to voice of dis-satisfaction. Considering that in the last 40 years of Indian general elections, only once has a party been voted to power based on a promise [BJP under Atal Behari Vajpayee] and not on an anti-incumbency wave, it is absolutely critical to respect the voice of dissent.

Most elections are fought on attacking the poor governance of an incumbent and the incumbent trying hard to protect its turf. In such a scenario, to appropriately reflect the popularity of a candidate all negative votes need to be consolidated. Interestingly, the election arithmetic dissipates the election impact of any other negative sentiment by distributing the anti-incumbency [or other negative wave] votes among multiple parties. Thus making it less difficult for parties/candidates carrying a negative sentiment to get their desired electoral outcomes.

That takes us to the negative vote. Wherein, the voter has to option to either cast a positive vote for or a negative vote against any candidate. The total positive votes less the total negative votes will be the net vote of a candidate and the candidate with maximum net vote wins. This would better consolidate the voice of negative sentiment and will give the requisite power to shape election results – and governments such as the one currently at the centre will not have any chance to come back to power. Even a opportunistically aggregated conglomerate of regional parties will provide better governance than the current dispensation – at least it will give the nation as choice and will keen under check the tendency amongst incumbents to get arbitrary and arrogant.

The negative vote, will have another power. As the real popularity is reflected in net votes – which are expected to be abysmal – entry barriers for educated, committed and capable candidates will dramatically fall. This challenge the status-quo of the current oligarchy [read oligopoly], where one candidate with vested interests replaces a look alike. Fresh faces, with a positive agenda can use targeted guerilla tactics to fell the Goliaths with one-tenth the resources [men, money, material and votes!!]. Thus, the negative vote – has the power to transform the quality of the representatives that are sent to the parliament / assemblies / local bodies / gram panchayats. It will either bust bad candidates or it will force established parties to field better candidates. Either way, the quality of elected representatives will substantially improve.

Bhubaneswar

May 18, 2013