NEW DELHI: Sitaram Yechury, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has written the following letter to the Chief Election Commissioner demanding to scrap of memorandum of understandings (MOUs) signed by the Gujarat Election Commissioner with industrial units to monitor electoral participation of the workforce.
Referring to a news report, Yechury in the letter said, "We strongly feel that this is nothing short of being outrageous. The EC has claimed that it is an attempt to address voter apathy, but the fact is that the move to name and shame those who do not vote is a coercive step towards compulsory voting."
According to the news report, the Gujarat Chief Electoral Officer has signed 233 MoUs that "will help us enforce the guidelines of the Election Commission."
"It is unfortunate that we have to remind you that right to vote is guaranteed by the Constitution of India under Article 326...Let us also remind you that in dealing with the mandatory voting right, the Supreme Court had asked the Centre to file a response. The response filed in 2015 by the Union Minister for Law and Justice stated that if a regime of compulsory voting is introduced, it could result in the creation of an undemocratic environment in the country. The Union Government also contended that the right to vote also included the right not to vote," read the letter.
The CPIM leader further stated that in its submission, the Union Government had also quoted the Law Commission report on electoral reforms saying that the Commission had noted that the right to vote cannot be imposed as a fundamental duty.
"The current move by the EC of involving corporates in enforcing the right to vote as a fundamental duty is outright unconstitutional. Apart from this it further involves the corporates in the conduct of the elections in an already controversial background of anonymous corporate funding through Electoral Bonds," Yechury said.
"Further, in the current EVM machine counting process, the earlier practice of mixing the ballot papers no longer exists in practice. EVM counting gives transparently the coting pattern of each booth. This makes the workers being verified by this process of corporate supervision very vulnerable to intimidation and vindictive action. This makes a mockery of the secret ballot," he stated urging the Election Commission to set all controversy to rest by scrapping this reported move.