In 36 hours from now, the kind of governance 1/7th of the world's population will get for the coming five years (hopefully), will be decided. India's election results will decide if 'we, the people' will throw out a corrupt and incompetent government with a weak leadership in a hope to undo the damage done by the latter in the last decade.
Having a first hand experience of the counting process, I have decided to share my experience (My father has been a BJP candidate in Delhi Assembly Elections 2013) as most of us only get the picture through the media. You can scale up the process by a factor of 5-10 to guess the same for parliamentary elections. Each parliamentary seat is comprised of 10 assembly seats in Delhi and each candidate can bring 60 people as opposed to 10 in Delhi assembly elections. The numbers will vary for bigger constituencies esp. in states like Bihar, MP, UP etc.
In our case, there were 142 voting machines at various booths across the constituency. Each candidate could bring 10 people (I will term them agents, henceforth) for the counting. This essentially meant the counting would be done in batches of 10 and each candidate will have one of his agent on each window. One batch of counting took somewhere around 20 minutes from start to finish. Since, the independent candidates generally do not bring 10 people, the bigger candidates take that opportunity to get some of their own people as agents, on formers' behalf. We, as also the Congress, had taken 30-35 agents inside. This is also essential as the atmosphere sometimes becomes really heated inside, during the process. The large presence of each other's supporters acts somewhat as a deterrence to physical violence (An area we need to mature as a democracy). Though security forces also guard the arena tighty, there presence is largely outside the hall.
We were allowed entry at 8AM inside a huge hall with 80% of area secured with iron fence. This 80% area had an altogether separate entry where only EC (Election Commission) officials, the candidates and the security forces could enter. There were 10 windows near the iron fence where we split ourselves up with roughly 2-3 people per window. Once, all the people settled, the EC in-charge of that constituency explained the whole process. The process began with counting of the votes of police and government officials who were deployed on the election day. They had voted 3 days before the general public on conventional ballot papers. This process took time as the counting was manual.
Once the manual counting was over, the following process continued till all the machines were opened.
The security guards would bring one machine each to the ten windows. The officials at the window would show the seal/signature on the machine to each representative outside the window. (The candidates use their mark to seal the machine at the end of the voting on the voting day.) The agents would check their candidates' seal to confirm that there was no tampering with the machines between the voting day and the counting day. The officials then break the seal and turn the machine on. First, the total number of votes the machine has recorded is displayed, which is then followed by the number of candidates. (The total number of votes recorded by machine should match the count presiding officer provided at the end of the voting on the voting day.) The machine then displays the number of votes in each candidates account, sequentially. Since, the display is old fashioned and archaic, it just displays the number. If a candidate is somewhere in the bottom, he needs to keep a count of the serial number himself. The result is displayed at least twice and untill every agent on that window is satisfied.
The officials at the window then write the record on a sheet of paper and get it signed by each of the candidates' agent in front of their window. All these papers are then collected and provided to the EC incharge of that constituency. The incharge then collates the data of the all 10 machines (and previous rounds), writes on a white board and announces the result to the room.
This last piece of information, to my knowledge, comes to the media through unofficial channels (candidates' agents, officials, support staff etc). The media based on this information then telecasts who is leading and by how many votes. The important point here is that the machines are opened in sequence. So, 1-2 batches generally represents a whole area. So, the situation that media telecasts (about who is leading) changes batch per batch very quickly depending on which community is pre-dominant in that area and its political preferences. It is likely that a candidate A leads by nK votes for 70% of the batches and loses because of the one-sided support to other candidate in the last 30% batches. In this case, till around 70% of the time, media will telecast the result as 'A winning or won' when deep down A and his agents know how crucial the last 30% batches are.
In Delhi, we had got a good picture by 11:30 AM about our constituency's results and I hope on Friday, we should get an idea of who is forming the next government by 2-3PM IST.
Next Post - What could be and what should be improved on the vote counting process in the interest of secrecy of voting. (To prevent voter intimidation)
P.S. - Comments are moderated.
