Why NOTA Is The Wrong Answer To Any Problem Of Electoral Democracy

In one of the most relatable dialogue ever said on the silver screen, Jim Broadbent’s character reminds his minion in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York: the appearance of law and order must be upheld (pause) especially while it is being broken.

I was reminded of this quote as I read a new petition seeking changes to the election rules to make NOTA (none of the above) more powerful. Once you look past the virtue signalling, the entire NOTA advocacy appears to be about upholding appearance of voter empowerment, while they are being stripped of the same.

Simply speaking, NOTA is not only useless in the context of empowering citizens or bringing accountability in parties, (as NOTA advocates claim) but in today’s context, it is sure to become a tool in the hands of election savvy political parties. A short analysis follows.

In today’s discourse, myth making is upstream of narrative building. Therefore, it occasions no surprise to see many myths being assiduously built surrounding the NOTA option. One of the most prominent of those is NOTA being a vote against the incumbent.

This is the same specious logic many ‘lefties’ gave about the National Democratic Alliance government being rejected by 69 per cent of the people of the country (read my short rebuttal pointing out the flaws of that logic on my Facebook timeline here).

A NOTA voter is rejecting all candidates equally. He or she is just as likely to have voted for the losing party last time as the incumbent. Unless there is a system of knowing which candidate the NOTA voters had voted for in the previous election (which in turn will violate the sanctity of the concept of secret ballot), it is impossible to know exactly what the NOTA voters are protesting against.

As the NOTA advocates are aware of the miniscule percentage of voters going with NOTA, they indulge in another misdirection, a sleight of hand, if you will, by pointing out that in many elections NOTA votes exceeded the victory margin between the top two candidates.

Again, this statistics makes sense only if there is some evidence that in the previous election, all the current NOTA voters had voted for the party/candidate with the second highest votes. As specious and false as that assumption is, even if we give a benefit of (non-existent) doubt and assume so, it is still hard to see what message those voters gave to the number two party/candidate that they could not have given by simply staying home on election day.

Let’s now look at the main demand of many NOTA advocates, viz; if NOTA votes exceed those of winning candidate from a constituency, fresh polls be conducted. Reading the arguments in favour of this will make one believe that NOTA is catching up in popularity and it is only a matter of time before we have our first case of NOTA garnering highest votes.

One example often quoted to support the above argument is that of former union minister A Raja, who lost the Nilgiris seat in 2014 to the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam candidate, where NOTA had emerged as the third preference of voters behind the top two candidates.

Gives you the impression that NOTA gave the winning candidates a run for their money, doesn’t it? What is conveniently left out of this story is the fact that the top two candidates polled close to 90 per cent of the total votes counted and that if NOTA was indeed a candidate it would have lost by over 4 lakh votes to the winning candidate, and by over 3 lakh votes to A Raja.

So if the demand of fresh polls is largely hypothetical, why not simply accept it and move on? Because, it does not fulfil the reason for its existence, when taken to its logical conclusion. Consider the unlikely scenario of NOTA polling highest votes, and fresh polls being called. What exactly would these new polls achieve apart from tying down parties in even longer campaign cycles than they already are, and incurring more expenditure to the exchequer?

If NOTA is supposed to be the voter’s expression of angst against the quality of candidates being fielded, isn’t the angst primarily directed at the parties that build their organisation around such candidates?

Unless you are also proposing that not only the candidates but also the parties be disqualified from contesting the new polls, will not rejecting one set of candidates from all parties simply become a meaningless exercise of replacing one set of ill-suited candidates with another equally ill-suited candidates from the same ideology/organisations?

In fact, a fresh poll might suit those bad candidates better, as in the second round, many independent and smaller party candidates may opt out due to a lack of resources, and thus would reduce the number of contestants.

By the way, what would happen if the fresh poll yields highest votes to NOTA again? How many times will we do this exercise? The argument that this exercise would eventually lead to parties being forced to field better candidates is a classic left argument of seeking a change today, (make NOTA more powerful) promising an improvement at an unspecified future date. In reality, ordinary voters are likelier to tire of these never ending elections before political parties get the message.

A word to the NOTA voters who actually voted for the winning party/candidate in the last election and are now using the NOTA button to express their unhappiness. Voting is your right and nothing should stop you from exercising it. But have no illusion that your vote is not for the principal opponent of the winning party.

I remember having a conversation with a taxi driver when I had gone to Mumbai to run the Mumbai marathon. This man who hailed from Uttar Pradesh, told me he had actually fought the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 as an independent. As I could not hide my amusement at being driven by someone who could have been an MP, the taxi driver said “sir, humko votes khane ke liye khada karte hain” (sir, we are fielded to eat into people’s vote shares).

Well, NOTA is the political parties’ cost-effective vote-eating tool. After all, encouraging a bunch of self-righteous, over entitled individuals to press NOTA through clever appeals to their vanity during the campaign must be much cheaper than sponsoring independent candidates like my taxi driver friend.

The solution to the problem of bad candidates in politics lies in encouraging good people to enter politics. To make that possible, law and order (allowing anyone to contest elections without fear) and campaign finance (making it a level playing field) should be the focus area instead of an ill-suited, essentially counter-productive option like NOTA.

And as much as I hate finishing on an offending note, there is a grain of truth in what the late George Carlin says in this amazing rant here (caution: explicit language). The candidates are the reflection of the society we live in. It is what we got. The attempt to change the quality of leaders will have to go in tandem with the attempt to build a more value-based, moral society.