CHIEF ELECTION Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Friday said it was time for election management bodies (EMBs) to come up with their own “election integrity index”, while raising concern over existing democracy indices becoming tools to discredit elections. Speaking at the conclusion of a two-day international conference of EMBs hosted by the EC, the CEC said although the topic was not discussed at the conference, it was important for EMBs to consider. “Measuring democracy is certainly a worthwhile job and has its uses. But those who measure the democratic indices and the parameters they need to be rational and transparent. There is an opaqueness in the indices which are used. While so many other considerations can be subjective in interpretation, an election is possibly a hard fact on the ground that holds testimony to the quality of election integrity in a country. Parameters to measure electoral integrity must transparently be based on such hard facts, rather than on views and anecdotes,” he said. While Kumar did not name any particular ranking, in the past few years, the Democracy Index published by The Economist and the Democracy Report by the V-Dem Institute have flagged a decline in India’s position. The CEC said there were some indices based on “few media reports and social media conversations, without looking at the hard facts of elections”. “Such ratings become tools for discrediting elections. At times, these ratings come when the elections are live. Therefore, maybe it is time to have an ‘Election Integrity Index’, either in addition to democracy index or a separate index within democracy index with pre-qualified weightage. Let’s not make life difficult for EMBs by being insensitive to the credibility of the election,” the CEC said, underlining that the EMBs face several challenges while conducting elections. “It is also time for EMBs to devise and demand transparency in the parameters which are used for indices, maybe this is one area for deliberations in future,” Kumar said. He said indices should take into account the way the election was conducted, if voters could register freely, if there were any restrictions on them from coming out to vote among other things. The CEC also flagged the threat of “external influences” through “cyber interference and disinformation” facing EMBs today. He said while social media platforms had democratised access to information, they had also become tools to destroy the core of democracy. He said “anti-pollution measures” were needed for social media - algorithms can be used to detect fake news and stop its circulation. Kumar said the EC had to spend time and energy during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to counter fake content online. This is not the first time that the CEC Kumar has expressed concern over democracy indices. At a conference hosted by the EC ahead of Summit for Electoral Democracy in Mexico in 2022, he had said ranking of democracies should be objective and include local context of the country. Later that year, he said at the Association of World Election Bodies meeting in South Africa that the parameters used by some international organisations for assessing democracies needed to be revisited.
