The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre and the Election Commission of India to respond to a plea that fresh elections should be conducted in constituencies where the maximum votes polled are NOTA.
The petition said candidates ‘rejected’ by voters should not be fielded again in the fresh polls.
During the hearing, Chief Justice of India Sharad A. Bobde expressed doubts initially about the feasibility of the petition by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay to arm the electorate with the “right to reject” and nudge political parties to present voters with a better choice of candidates to pick from.
Chief Justice Bobde said if voters kept rejecting candidates, Parliament/Assembly seats would continue to remain vacant, affecting legislative functioning.
“It is a constitutional problem. If your argument is accepted and there is a certain number of NOTAs, then the constituency will go unrepresented in the Parliament... How will the Parliament function then?” Chief Justice Bobde asked senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy, who represented Mr. Upadhyay.
But Ms. Guruswamy replied that “if voters are given the power to reject, political parties will take care to field worthy candidates in the first place...”
The petition noted how parties spent crores of rupees on the candidates.
The CJI also flagged during the hearing the issue whether a political party could influence voters to not vote in a particular constituency.
However, Ms. Guruswamy prevailed, which led the court to agree to examine the issue raised in the petition.
“Political parties choose contesting candidates in a very undemocratic manner without consulting electors. That is why many times people in constituency are totally discontented with candidates presented before them. This problem can be solved by holding a fresh election if maximum votes are polled in favour of NOTA. In such situation, the contesting candidates should be considered as rejected and not be allowed in fresh election,” the petition said.
Ms. Guruswamy submitted that right to reject and elect new candidate would give power to the people to express their discontent.
The senior lawyer said the ‘right to reject’ was first proposed by the Law Commission in its 170th Report in 1999. Similarly, the Election Commission had twice endorsed ‘right to reject’.
Likewise, the ‘Background Paper on Electoral Reforms’ prepared by the Ministry of Law in 2010 had proposed that if certain percentage of the vote was negative, then election result should be nullified and new election should be held.
