Election Commission likely to introduce ‘preferred time-slot’ for voters

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The idea is to essentially encourage voters—particularly in urban areas—to go up to the polling booths and vote. “Often, we see that a substantial chunk of urban voters don’t step out to vote fearing long queues at the polling station. A system that can enable them to pick a time-slot of their choice and vote without having to stand in a queue would be a great way to encourage them to vote,” an EC official said. The idea, EC officials said, is still at the drawing-board stage and may take some fine-tuning before being rolled out.

Several similar measures to tackle urban voter apathy have been attempted by the EC over the past few elections. In Chandigarh, for instance, the use of “Queue Monitoring System” enabled voters to actually check the length of the queue at their respective polling stations before stepping out to vote during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Under the system, voters had to send their voter card number, prefixed by the letters “BTH” (for ‘booth’), as a text message to a designated number to receive an instant SMS informing them of the number of people waiting to vote at their booth at that time. The same information could be accessed over the Internet at a designated web site. Over 40,000 voters used this system in Chandigarh which recorded its highest ever turnout of 74 percent during those polls.

Similarly, a system of issuing tokens—having a serial number—was tried out in a few polling stations where voters, after getting the token, could just await their turn relaxing in a waiting room without having to stand in a queue.

The EC, meanwhile, is also considering the possibility of sending the voter-slips to electors through SMS.
For the past couple of years, the EC–in a major move to encourage voter participation–has started getting home delivered voter slips that contain all the details of a voter and his polling station. This has proven to be a key intervention to encourage voter participation since it has eliminated the hassle a voter used to undergo at the polling station just to find out his/her details. However, there have been complaints that these voter-slips do not get home-delivered at times. It is with a view to tackle this, the EC is now mulling sending the voter-slips to voters in an electronic form.