Any change to a system should lead to greater efficiency and speedier solutions. But what if the change leads to worsening of the system?
Take the case of Electronic Voting Machines in the elections. The EVMs were supposed to speed up the election process. And one of its major advantage was its ability to announce the result, technically, within a couple of hours of the last vote being polled. As such, with elections in TN and Kerala over on April 13th, one would have expected the result to be announced within a few hours. Heck! The results were being announced within a day in the good old days when the paper ballot was being used.
But our Election Commission wont have anything of it. They have complicated a simple system (a trade mark Indian trait), clubbed elections of 5 states, spread it over 5 months, and announced that counting will start only after all the elections are over. I fail to understand how the results of Kerala will affect the West Bengal Assembly Elections. I can understand it influencing in a Parliament election, but frankly Kerala elections wont even affect the results of the neighbouring TN, leave alone WB. The surprising part is that, no one is raising their voice against the stupidity of the Election Commission.There is another flip side to this. The people have voted one way or other, and in some cases the incumbent party in power would have been shown the door by the voters. But the party and its CM continues to rule for a further period of one month, during which they can do lot of damage. Imagine DMK knowing through its own exit polls that they may lose. They can use the one month period to destroy all evidence of wrong doing and corruption, as they are still in power. The ministers can also take any decisions as they deem fit, as they are not covered by the election commission guidelines as the polls are over!! Imagine how much damage they can do by favouring their cronies!!!
Either Election Commission should conduct the polls within a span of 3-4 days or they should allow separate counting of votes.
P.S : I heard that the political parties in TN have deployed their party cadres to keep a vigil on the EVMs to avoid them being 'tampered'!!! Gosh! which era are they living in!!!! The 'tampering' of EVM can be done by tinkering with the software 'much before' the first vote is cast. How it is done is by writing a program that will ensure all the 3rd, 5th, 7th , 9th vote cast will automatically be logged against a particular party. What can a physical vigil do to prevent this??People are so naive.
