How do you run a democracy when the mercury rises above 40°C?
That is the problem faced by voters in India. A swath of the country’s east is sweltering under a brutal heatwave. The city center of Kolkata has emptied out, schools have cancelled classes and one TV presenter collapsed on air with heat stroke.
The first round of seven-phase general elections, which took place on Friday last week, seems to have been another casualty: Turnout was down four percentage points relative to the last poll in 2019, the Indian Express newspaper said.
Multiple officials quoted by the paper cited the effect of extreme heat, adding also that a busy wedding season and general apathy might have been factors.
Some of the most intense temperatures last week were on the east coast, keenly watched battlegrounds where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has traditionally been weak relative to its performance in the rest of the country.
There were about 7.6 million fewer voters in the 102 seats polled on Friday last week, estimates by election analyst and political activist Yogendra Yadav showed.
The world’s largest democracy is only going to struggle more with this as the planet warms. It would have to overhaul its hulking electoral machinery to keep up.
The length of voting lines in US federal elections (especially in majority-black districts) are a perennial scandal, prompting lawsuits, protests and a Curb Your Enthusiasm story line. However, the challenges you would face standing around in the middle of fall in the US are nothing compared with an Indian pre-monsoon heatwave.
There are idealistic and cynical reasons to change. Encouraging the highest possible turnout ought to be an end in itself for any democracy. My own country, Australia, is one of more than a dozen where voting is mandatory.
US elections have been held at the start of November since the mid-19th century, because farmers in what was then a largely agricultural society had completed the harvest and the coldest winter weather was yet to come. That was seen as the best way of boosting turnout.
India might have ended up with its recent run of summer elections for similar reasons.
Prime ministers, as in the UK, get to choose the date of the polls. However, between monsoons (1), wedding seasons, religious festivals, three separate cropping seasons and surprisingly intense winters, there just are not that many suitable dates. As a result, every Indian general election since 2004 has been held in April and May.
There is a more wily reason to target the changing seasons, too. Climate seems to have measurable, if much-debated, effects on voter behavior.
In the UK, all but one of the 11 general elections since 1979 have also happened in April, May or June, when politicians appear to believe the spring sunshine would imbue people with a feeling of optimism that would benefit incumbents. By the same token, waiting in line in furnace-like temperatures might not be the best way to convince wavering voters the government has its priorities straight.
There are plenty of fixes that could be made here.
India has nearly a billion registered voters, but few provisions to make the ballot process easier. Postal and absentee voting is only available to people with disabilities, those over 85 (raised this time around, from 80 in 2019) and certain essential services workers. Everyone else needs to turn up on the day or miss the opportunity.
Roughly half a billion people who have migrated from other areas of the country face barriers to voting in their home towns, an issue the Election Commission of India is only starting to address.
In-person pre-poll voting might be a challenge given the sheer scale of the vote. There simply are not enough poll workers to run it in a country with a million voting booths. Still, postal ballots ought to be far more widely used.
Above all, though, Indian politicians need to reconsider the timing of the vote.
Punishing monsoon seasons are not going away any time soon. Indeed, they are only likely to get worse, as the accumulated carbon pollution from richer countries, as well as that resulting from Modi’s own failing renewables programs, raises temperatures in April and May to still more unbearable levels. An earlier ballot, perhaps kicking off after Republic Day in late January, would avoid the worst times.
It is possible the current election could provide the catalyst for such a change.
Despite the Bharatiya Janata Party’s roots as an urban, upper-caste party, the constituencies that Modi has increasingly relied upon since coming to power in 2014 have been precisely the rural, lower-income and lower-caste voters who are most likely to be put off by sweltering weather on election day. The low turnout on Friday last week appears to have rattled him.
We should normally worry when populist leaders start messing around with the mechanics of elections. However, if it would mean more voters getting to India’s polls without withering in the summer heat, that might be a risk worth taking.
(1) Studies of US and Dutch elections report a remarkably consistent finding that every 25mm (1 inch) of rainfall decreases voter turnout by about one percentage point.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
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