Fall in voting percentage a worry: Gopalaswami

CHENNAI: Former chief election commissioner N Gopalaswami expressed concern over the decline in voting percentage and stressed the need for people to cast their votes or else the country will have a representative who will be elected by only by 25 per cent of population.

With the voting percentage coming down, a contestant can now win by securing only 25 per cent votes of the people and be declared their representative, Gopalaswami told a gathering of retired professionals and officials during the Probus Club of Chennai’s Breakfast meeting on Saturday.

“Now what is happening is more and more political parties contest a election to split the votes and we have representative who has only 12 per cent of the votes,” he said.

After the government amended the People’s Representation Act in 2003 making political parties exempt from law, lot of parties mushroomed and currently India has more than 1,000 parties of which only five are national and 45 state.

“Many parties who were having a membership of 100 people sprang up just to get exemption from taxes. While Election Commission tried to deregister such parties, the Supreme Court said we can’t deregister a party,” he said.

He said electronic voting machines could not be hacked, but could be tampered with manually.