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Negative voting concept has always suited my taste. Be it sending SMS votes in BIG BOSS for evicting celebrity member from the house or our Super Powers vetoing any resolution in UN Assembly, negative voting always doesn’t allow any initiative/plan to materialize until and unless everyone( who matters in case of UN at least J) agrees. It is something like if the decision is not almost unanimous, it cannot be implemented.

My tryst with the concept started in Jan 2005. During a management program at BHEL Hyderabad, like me all Engineer Trainees were asked to cast 4 votes (2 positive and equally numbered negative). We had a batch of 64 engineers and we knew each other well since two months of Induction training was just about to end. The instructor was well qualified and complete anonymity was maintained for votes. In our ballots we had to also provide the reason of liking (positive) and disliking (negative). So totally there were 64*4 =256 feedback votes (128 positive + 128 negative). The results and the aftermath analysis were surprising and interesting. People got all combination of votes. There were few who didn’t get any vote, positive or negative. The instructor suggested those people to interact more within the group and asked them to introspect why people are not at all bothered about them. Majority of people managed to get few positive or negative votes. Among all groups, three were distinctively different. One set of people got some average plus positive and very less negative impression another got average plus negative and very few positive and distinctly there was a set of people who got more than average +ve and more than –ve both votes. The instructor commented that the last group is always the talk of the society but not everyone like them. If they take their negative feedback in a constructive way it will surely help them in evolving as a better human being.

Let’s try to bring the above mentioned concept to Indian Democratic setup. While discussing this we need to keep following points in mind.

• Can it increase the number of Voters actually exercising their rights?
• Can it really result in bringing out better representatives?
• What if all candidates finally end up with negative counts?
• What if two or more candidates are at tie (say 0 or +5), but total number of votes that they received is unequal (+1000,-1000 & (+5,-5))?

Like the existing simple majority rule where the candidate who gets the maximum number of votes is declared elected, the negative voting concept coupled with conventional voting methodology has its own merits and demerits. But for people like me, it will surely help in pushing us to polling booths that cannot see people like Lalu Prasad, DeveGowda, Sharad Pawar, Modi and majority of highly acclaimed politicians in power. At least I can deduct one vote from their account.