•Vandita Mishra: The elections are still in progress but what are the challenges the Election Commission faced while conducting an election in the India of 2009?

For the common man, the entire election process seems like a simple matter of casting a vote but the sheer enormity of the process is quite mind-boggling. We have an electorate of about 71 crore people and the Election Commission is committed to ensuring that our reach is 100 per cent. Every vote counts. You know that in the Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls last year, two candidates lost by one vote each. That’s why we had a polling booth in Gujarat for one voter which meant that while the voter could come to vote at his leisure, the team of five polling staff members had to set up shop at 7 a.m. as per the law and leave only at 5 p.m., in case someone else turned up challenging that one person’s vote. In Chhattisgarh, we had one polling booth for two voters and in Arunachal Pradesh, we had one booth with three voters. About 70 lakh people are deputed under the Election Commission which is responsible for their postings and the internal discipline. Our own staff at Nirvachan Sadan is very small—about 300—apart from the state Chief Electoral Officers who have a staff of about 8-9 people each. There are 1.5 million balloting units or Electronic Voter Machine (EVMs) that were used and we had to ensure that they all worked. Four lakh vehicles, including two lakh buses, are being used in this election to ferry election staff to the polling stations. We used about 80 helicopters taken from the Ministry of Defence and the Home Ministry.

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