{Article} Polity: Need to Debate Representativeness of Elected Representatives Regardless of Political Convenience or Administrative Constraints

The Vice President of India, Shri M. Hamid Ansari has said that a majority of elected members of the Lok Sabha in recent years, and even earlier, won on a minority of votes cast in their constituencies. This is compounded by the absence, in our system, of compulsory voting. Thus if a candidate is elected on 30 percent of the votes cast and if the percentage of polling is the constituency is 60, then the positive mandate secured by the candidate is 30 percent of 60 percent, that is, just 18 percent of the total electorate. Such an outcome has a distorting impact on the composition of the elected legislature. This is vividly demonstrated by the vote-share seat-won data relating to all the fifteen Lok Sabhas.
He expressed his concern that the situation is no better, perhaps worse, in State assembly elections with percentage of returned candidates on minority of votes cast going above 70 percent in several cases.
He said that what are the ramifications of such an outcome? Observers have noted that it induces candidates to focus on securing votes of a segment of the electorate and thereby induce, accentuate or reinforce social divisions based on caste, creed, faith or language. For this purpose, and despite formal legal or regulatory constrains, candidates or their supporters do succeed in invoking narrower loyalties to further electoral appeal. The excluded or marginalised social groups “then indulge in strategic voting.”
He opined that the electoral methodology adopted and practiced by us is the single member plurality system, otherwise known as the First-Past-the Post (FPTP) system. The traditional arguments in its favour are that (a) it tends to provide a clear-cut contest between two or more major parties (b) its working is easy for voters to understand (c) it allows individuals who are not members of a political party to run as independents (d) it tends to produce stable governments and (e) it is likely to produce a strong opposition party.
Despite the above, the system is not universal and critics have commented on its limitations. These relate to the (i) disconnect between the vote share and the number of seats won (ii) propensity to over-reward major parties and under-reward smaller parties (iii) likelihood of smaller parties with strong regional base getting a “seat bonus” and winning more seats than their corresponding share of the popular vote.