A Step Towards Simultaneous Elections? Prime Minister’s Office Holds Meeting To Discuss Common Voters List For All Polls In Country

In a significant development, Prime Minister's Office (PMO) earlier this month held a meeting to discuss the possibility of instituting a common voter's list for elections to all the local bodies, State Assemblies and the Lok Sabha, reports Indian Express.

The meeting chaired by PK Mishra, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on 13 August discussed two options. First, a constitutional amendment to Articles 243K and 243ZA that would make it mandatory to have a single electoral roll for all polls in the country.

Second, to persuade the state governments to tweak their respective laws and adopt the Election Commission’s (EC) voters list for local body polls.

The development gains significance from the fact that a common voter list for all elections ties in with the idea of simultaneous polls, an idea which PM Narendra Modi had tried to push during his first term.

Common electoral roll and simultaneous elections are also the promises made by the BJP government in its general elections manifesto in a bid to save government and administrative expenditure, and the efforts spent on frequent electioneering activity.

At present, while some of the States use the Election Commission's (EC) voters list to conduct elections for municipalities and panchayats, several others use their own electoral rolls for carrying out the local body polls.

States with own electoral rolls for local body polls include Uttar Pradesh (UP), Uttarakhand, Odisha, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Odisha, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and also the Union Territory (UT) of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).

It should be noted that the demand for preparing a common electoral roll has even been raised by the Law Commission and the EC. While the Law Commission had recommended it in its 255th report in 2015, the EC had also pushed for it in 1999 and 2004.

EC had in the past reasoned that the preparation of separate electoral lists by the poll body and the State Election Commissions (SECs) caused duplication of the same task between two different agencies. It had also reasoned that two lists often left the voters confused since they would end up finding their names present in one list, and absent in another.