Top court seeks ECI reply on repolling if NOTA gets majority
Eleven years after giving voters the “none of the above” (Nota) option, the Supreme Court on Friday sought a response from the Election Commission of India (ECI) on a petition that demanded new elections be held in constituencies where the highest number of votes cast is for Nota.
Currently, the candidate who receives the second-highest number of votes is declared the winner if Nota garners the most votes in a constituency.
A bench, headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, also agreed to examine whether the polling body should promote and publicise Nota as a “fictional” electoral candidate in elections to raise voter awareness throughout the country.
The bench, which also comprised justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, however, expressed its reservations on the petitioner’s plea that the candidates “rejected” by voters by giving maximum votes to Nota should not be fielded again in the fresh polls.
“How can we do that? That would be a legislative choice. We don’t think we can do such a thing,” the bench told senior counsel Gopal Sankaranarayanan, who appeared for public interest litigation (PIL) petitioner Shiv Khera in the matter. Khera is a motivational speaker and author based in Delhi.
Sankaranarayanan emphasised that the petition aims at furthering the Supreme Court’s objective of introducing Nota in 2013 and optimising the choice of voters in the democracy. “In Surat, one candidate was declared winner without the necessity of casting votes because there was no other candidate in the fray. Voters did not have a choice,” he argued.
BJP candidate Mukesh Dalal was on Monday elected unopposed from Surat Lok Sabha seat in Gujarat after all other nominees withdrew from the fray, over a fortnight before the state will vote on May 7 in the third phase of the general elections, making it the first electoral success for any political outfit in the ongoing polls.
Agreeing to examine Khera’s petition, the bench issued notice to ECI. “Okay! We will examine this. After all, it’s a take-off from what we have done in the past. We will issue notice. This is about the electoral process also. Let us see what the Election Commission has to say on this,” the court observed.
In contrast to a negative vote, Nota is neutral and has no numerical value. It is ultimately discounted towards the final total. Despite the Nota option’s zero numerical value, the 2013 Supreme Court judgment held that including it “will indeed compel the political parties to nominate a sound candidate”. The 2013 judgment added: “Negative voting will lead to a systemic change in polls and political parties will be forced to project clean candidates. If the right to vote is a statutory right, then the right to reject a candidate is a fundamental right of speech and expression under the Constitution.”
The Nota button is at the bottom of the list of candidates on Electronic Voting Machines (EVMS). Nota received more than 650,000 votes in the general elections of 2019, or 1.06% of the total vote.