Why more than 5.5 lakh voters opted for NOTA in Gujarat polls
In a surprising development of the post-results analysis of the Gujarat Assembly elections 2017, it has emerged that the “none of the above” (NOTA) option has come on top in as many as 24 seats, without, however altering the fates of the winning candidates. Reports of NOTA having a vote share at 1.8 per cent, above the Aam Aadmi Party, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, have sent off alarm bells across the political and media ecosystem, and have reignited the debate on whether or not NOTA is a credible option.
More than 5.5 lakh voters opted for NOTA in the Gujarat polls, which registered about 68 per cent turnout, lower than the 2012 tally. Reports suggest that out of 182 constituencies, almost 100 registered more than 3,000 NOTA entries, with above 5,000 in as many as 16 seats. A report in The Hindu says that the highest number of NOTA entries has come from Danta, at 6,461 none-of-the-above votes, while Jetpur saw 6,155 NOTA nods.
This is below the vote share of the BJP, over 49 per cent, the Congress, over 42 per cent, and the independents, at 4.3 per cent, but it’s still a significantly high margin of no-votes. Yet, because NOTA does not stall the fortunes of the candidates in fray, other than denting everyone’s margin equally, does it really matter in a democratic voting process?
In fact, the post-results analysis has shown that NOTA has only managed to make the margin of victory wafer-thin such as in Godhra, where the BJP candidate won by just 258 votes, or Dholka, where the BJP MLA polled 327 more votes than the nearest rival from Congress. Since NOTA did not ultimately impact the outcome, then should it be allowed to continue as a polling option in our elections?
As Gujarat elections results demonstrate, it’s not so easy to pinpoint the uses of NOTA other than the basic democratic right of each and every citizen to reject candidates contesting in a particular election. It was in response to the petition filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) that the Supreme Court in October 2013 directed the Election Commission of India to “provide necessary provision in the ballot papers and EVMs and another button called ‘None of the Above’ may be provided in EVMs so that the voters, who come to the polling booth and decide not to vote for any of the candidates in the fray, are able to exercise their right not to vote while maintaining their right of secrecy”.
Yet, in case NOTA figures at the top above all the actual candidates, it just adjusts the margin of victory, without really being a decisive factor. It’s for this reason that some experts, including former CEC (chief election commissioner) SY Quraishi, have called NOTA just a “blank vote”.
NOTA is like a blank vote. It makes no impact on result. If 99 persons vote for NOTA and 1 for Prashant, for EC the winner is Prashant! https://t.co/fIDHyfrsGD
— Dr. S.Y. Quraishi (@DrSYQuraishi) December 18, 2017
NOTA is a waste. As far as the outcome of any election is concerned, your NOTA vote is exactly equivalent to your not voting at all. Even if NOTA gets the highest number of votes, the candidate with the most number of votes (after NOTA) wins the election. It is a trap for fools.
— Sanjiv Bhatt (IPS) (@sanjivbhatt) December 18, 2017
Yet, there have been opinions that NOTA is about securing the moral space in politics that shifts the spotlight from the contestants to the voters, and should be taken seriously. However, others think that low turnout of NOTA would mean people’s trust in democracy and the political class, and should be seen as an indicator of a healthy and functional system. For example, in Punjab Assembly polls earlier this year, the AAP got trounced, but there was a high number of NOTA entries, which helped the Congress edge past others since the fence-sitters had the option of casting a NOTA vote, while those who were convinced chose one party or the other.
While NOTA was introduced in Rajya Sabha in 2014, and the EC launched the NOTA symbol for EVMs in 2015, has NOTA really helped democracy other than giving a questionable sense of participating in the democratic elections process, without actually increasing the vote tally for any of the contestants? Is this about “maturing of Indian democracy”, or the increasing disillusionment with the polity?
Yet, in our first past the post system of electing candidates, does NOTA really help? Moreover, isn’t NOTA more likely to be exercised by relatively apolitical sections among urban, upper class voters, who can afford to delink themselves from the winning candidates and the actual local representative of the people, whether MLC, MLA or MP, which can be attributed to acquired privilege? Can a voter in small, rural constituencies afford to ignore the MLA and MLC, often the only link to a larger idea of a nation, the source of development, if any?
Improvements have been suggested to make NOTA work better for democracy instead of just being a glorified blank vote. For example, suggestions that if NOTA comes at the top, the constituency must go for re-polling; that candidates scoring below NOTA should lose their deposits, or be banned from contesting for a limited period; that political parties should bear the cost of re-election in case NOTA is at the top.
However, as of now, NOTA is as good as zero when it comes to deciding who would win, and works well for fence-sitters who do not want to carefully weigh their political options to elect a candidate. As Gujarat elections show, disenchantment expressed through NOTA often results in the party responsible for the disillusionment – such as the winning BJP in this case – is voted back to power. In such a scenario, unless NOTA is bolstered with more robust rules, democracy may be drawing a blank.