Flawed surveys, rankings damaging democracy: CEC

The conference, the third one hosted by the ECI as a part of the run-up to the second Summit for Democracy organised by the US later this month, focused on making elections more inclusive. A total of 59 participants from 31 countries or EMBs as well as representatives from international organisations working on election integrity attended, an ECI statement said.

Citing India’s example of conducting elections on a large scale and having a higher turnout of women voters than men in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Kumar said the work being done by EMBs was not being taken into account in surveys. While he did not specify a particular report or survey, there have been some democracy rankings released by international agencies in the past few years that have shown India falling in rank.

“The pioneering work done by various EMBs and EAs [election authorities] does not really find reflection in the survey reports and the kind of ratings published by several organisations. Contrarily, those with low inclusivity are often ranked high. This proposition needs rectification. Flawed surveys or reports cause more damage, maybe unintentionally. It causes damage to the credibility of the EMBs and EAs and the credibility of such outputs by the survey agencies and democracy by default,” Kumar said.

He urged the group, which is focused on election integrity, to come up with the “essential parameters” for such a surveys, which, he said, “unilaterally indict EMBs and are doing more harm than helping the cause of democracy”. He said the work of the cohort in the form of recommendations would be placed before the summit, which is scheduled to be held virtually on March 29 and March 30.