2.4.1. Electoral College

The Electoral College consists of:

1. Elected Members of the both the Houses of Parliament.

2. Elected members of Legislative Assemblies of States.

3. Elected members of the legislative assemblies of the Union Territories of Delhi and Puducherry (included by 70th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992).

This implies, that the following members are not allowed to vote in the Presidential election:

♤ Nominated members of the Lok Sabha.

♤ Nominated members of the Rajya Sabha.

♤ Nominated members of the Legislative Assemblies of State.

♤ Elected and Nominated members of the Legislative Councils of States.

♤ Nominated members of the Legislative Assembly of Delhi & Puducherry.

The Parliament has powers to regulate by law, the matters relating to the elections of the President and the Vice President (VP). As per the Presidential and Vice-Presidential Elections Act, a candidate, to be nominated for the office of the President, needs 50 electors as proposers and 50 electors as seconders (elector here implies a member of the President’s electoral college) for his or her name to appear on the ballot.

As far as practicable, there shall be uniformity of representation of the different States at the election, according to the population and the total number of elected members of the Legislative Assembly of each State, and parity shall also be maintained between the States as a whole and the Union (Art. 55). In this way, the President shall be a representative of the nation as well as a representative of the people in the different States. It also gives recognition to the status of the States in the federal system.

In order to secure uniformity in the scale of representation of the different States, it is provided that every elected member of the Legislative Assembly (Vidhan Sabha) of a State has to cast as many votes as there are multiples of one thousand in the quotient obtained by dividing the population of the State by the total number of elected members of the Assembly, and if, after taking the said multiples of one thousand, the remainder is not less than five hundred, the votes of each member referred to above are further increased by one. To put it in simpler words, each member of the Electoral College who is a member of a State Legislative Assembly (MLA) will have a number of votes calculated as follows: