#mandatoryvoting

Couple of weeks back Gujarat government passed a long pending legislation of making voting mandatory in local body elections. This bill was pending since 2009, with Governor Ms.Kamala Beniwal and the UPA government saying it would be against our fundamental rights. With change of guard at center enabled this bill to be passed finally. In my opinion, with "None of the Above (NOTA)" option available for the voters, voting should be mandatory. Earlier, one of the reason to give a miss to voting was because we were not pleased with the credentials of any of the candidates hence were against choosing them. But with NOTA addressing this drawback, it is not a problem. Electing a representative is a duty of the citizens and it is the key which would open the solutions to the problems faced by them. Hence, even the citizen should be accountable for choosing their representative. But there is also a flip side to this legislations, our mechanism of voting needs a person to be available in the constituency and vote from its designated booth. But there may be cases, where person may need to go out of station due to some urgent work, which would make him non participant in voting. Therefore, we need to evolve our voting system, one of the options could be developing evoting system which would enable a citizen to vote even if he is out his constituency. Another, area which needs development is the adress updation when a person changes his place of residence, currently its a tedious job where he has to cancel his ealier voter id and register for a new one. Instead of this, we can evolve a system would link his voter id card with aadhar and help him to update his address easily. With this we would he avoiding bogus voter ids and also making the process of adress updation an easier task. With these changes in our system, we can go ahead and making voting a mandatory for state and national elections.