17. Identifying problem areas with elections in India
The main problem areas may be identified to be as follows:
1. Increasing cost of elections leading to unethical, illegal and even mafia provided electoral funding, corruption, criminalisation and black money generation in various forms.
2. With the constituents/electors being the same for all directly elected representatives from the lowest Panchayat level to the Lok Sabha level, there are competing role expectations and conflict of perceptions e.g. the constituents expect even members of the Union Parliament to attend to their purely local problems.
3. With the electorate having no role in the selection of candidates and with majority of candidates being elected by minority of votes under the first-past-the-post system, the representative character of the representatives itself becomes doubtful and their representational legitimacy is seriously eroded. In many cases, more votes are cast against the winning candidates than for them. One of the significant probable causes may be the mismatch between the majoritarian or first-past-the-post system and the multiplicity of parties and large number of independents.
4. The question of defections under the Tenth Schedule.
5. Inaccurate and flawed electoral rolls and voter identity leading to rigging and denial of voting rights to a large number of citizens.
6. Booth capturing and fraudulent voting by rigging and impersonation.
7. Use of raw muscle power in the form of intimidation of voters either to vote against their will or not to vote at all, thus taking away the right of free voting from large sections of society and distorting the result thereby.
8. Involvement of officials and local administration in subverting the electoral process.
9. Engineered mistakes in counting of votes.
10. Criminalisation of the electoral process i.e. increasing number of contestants with serious criminal antecedents.
11. Divisive and disruptive tendencies including the misuse of religion and caste in the process of political mobilization of group identities on non-ideological lines.
12. An ineffective and slow judicial process of dealing with election petitions, rendering the whole process quite often meaningless.
13. Fake and non-serious candidates who create major practical difficulties and are also used indirectly to subvert the electoral process.
14. Incongruities in delimitation of constituencies resulting in poor representation.
15. Problems of instability, hung legislative houses and their relation to the electoral laws and processes.
16. Last but not the least, loss of systemic legitimacy due to decay in the standards of political morality and decline in the spirit of service and sacrifice in public life