Procedure of the President’s election
Description
Procedure of the President’s election
As the Head of the State, the President is a key part of Parliament.
• The President calls the two Houses of Parliament into session on the advice of the Council of Ministers.
• A Bill passed by the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha does not become a law unless assented to by the President.
• When Parliament is not in session, the President holds the power to sign a law with immediate effect through an Ordinance.
Who elects the President?
The manner of election of the President is provided in Article 55 of the Constitution. Electoral college consist of:
• Members of Parliament and Members of Legislative Assemblies (MPs and MLAs)
• Elected representatives from the Union Territories (UTs) of Delhi and Puducherry
Members of Legislative Councils and the 12 nominated members of Rajya Sabha do not participate in the voting process.
At least 50 elected representatives must propose a candidate, who must then be seconded by 50 other electors to run for the President's office.
The history behind having proposers and seconders
The requirement of having a certain number of electors propose a candidate was introduced after the experience of the first five Presidential elections. It was common then for several candidates to put themselves up for election when they did not have a remote chance of getting elected. In the 1967 Presidential elections, 17 candidates contested, but nine of them did not win a single vote. This repeated again in the 1969 elections, when out of 15 candidates, five did not secure any votes.
To discourage the practice, candidates had to secure at least 10 proposers and seconders each to contest the elections from the 1974 election onwards. A compulsory security deposit of Rs 2,500 was also introduced. The changes were brought in through an amendment to the Presidential and Vice-Presidential Act, 1952.
In 1997, the Act was further amended to increase the security deposit to Rs 15,000 and the minimum number of proposers and seconders to 50 each.
How are the votes calculated?
The Presidential election uses a special voting to tally the votes. A different voting weightage is assigned to an MP and an MLA.
• The value of each MLA's vote is determined based on the population of their state and the number of MLAs. For instance, an MLA from UP has a value of 208 while an MLA from Sikkim has 7 (see Table 1). Due to a Constitutional Amendment passed in 2002, the population of the state as per the 1971 census is taken for the calculation.
• The value of an MP's vote is the sum of all votes of MLAs across the country divided by the number of elected MPs.
What is the number of votes required to win?
The voting for the Presidential elections is done through the system of single transferable vote. In this system, electors rank the candidates in the order of their preference. The winning candidate must secure more than half of the total value of valid votes to win the election. This is known as the quota.
Assuming that each elector casts his vote and that each vote is valid:
The anti-defection law which disallows MPs from crossing the party line does not apply to the Presidential election. This means that the MPs and MLAs can keep their ballot secret.
The counting of votes takes place in rounds. In Round 1, only the first preference marked on each ballot is counted. If any of the candidates secures the quota at this stage, he or she is declared the winner. If no candidate secures the quota in the first round, then another round of counting takes place. In this round, the votes cast to the candidate who secures the least number of votes in Round 1 are transferred. This means that these votes are now added to the second preference candidate marked on each ballot. This process is repeated till only one candidate remains. Note that it is not compulsory for an elector to mark his preference for all candidates. If no second preference is marked, then the ballots are treated as exhausted ballots in Round 2 and are not counted further.
Some facts:
• The fifth Presidential election which elected Mr. VV Giri is the only instance when a candidate did not secure the quota in the first round. The second preference votes were then evaluated and Mr. Giri secured 4,20,077 of the 8,36,337 votes and was declared the President.
• India’s sixth President, Mr. Neelam Sanjiva Reddy who served from 1977 to 1982 was the only President to be elected unopposed. 37 candidates had filed their nominations for the 1977 elections, however on scrutiny, the nomination papers of 36 candidates were rejected by the Returning Officer and Mr. Reddy was the only candidate standing.
