NEW DELHI: Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to examine a proposal to make ‘none of the above (NOTA)’ choice available to voters even when a single candidate is in the fray to enable them to express their approval of him/her, and countermand the elections if NOTA votes exceed votes polled by the candidate.Despite Centre and EC terming NOTA, put in place based on SC’s 2013 judgment, a failed idea for the poor response it received from voters, a bench of Justices Surya Kant, Ujjal Bhuyan and N K Singh said, “It is an interesting question. It is true that elections in India are keenly contested. But imagine a situation where the voters do not want the single candidate in the fray, who would otherwise be elected unopposed, to be their representative in the assembly or Lok Sabha?”Justice Kant added, “If there is resentment among voters against the single candidate, then the voters will come out in numbers and choose NOTA. If NOTA votes exceed the votes garnered by the single candidate in the fray, then what should be done? This may be academic, but a very interesting question which may require judicial deliberation.”Attorney general R Venkataramani said it was purely a non-plausible concept in the Indian context. For EC, senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi said NOTA had never impacted an election since its inception. Every winning candidate has so far got higher votes than NOTA even though some of the losing candidates had secured less than NOTA votes, he said.However, he said EC would scrupulously conduct elections as mandated by law and the orders of the SC. Additional solicitor general S D Sanjay asked the bench what would happen if an election was countermanded because of NOTA getting more votes than the single candidate in the fray, and a similar situation emerged in the fresh election.Responding to a PIL on the issue filed by ‘Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy’, EC in its affidavit said candidates getting elected unopposed from a Lok Sabha constituency was very rare. Since 1991, there has been only one such instance, Dwivedi said. “Since 1971 till today, that is in the last 54 years, there have been six uncontested elections in total. In the 20 general elections since 1951, there have been only nine uncontested elections,” he added.“Treating NOTA as a mandatorily contesting candidate in all direct uncontested elections does not find place in the statute and the same would require legislative amendments in the provisions of Representation of the People Act, 1951, and the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961,” EC said.
