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What does Free and Fair, Transparent, Accountable elections mean?

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  1. Free and fair elections:

    Government and its authority should only derive from free will of the people. This will should get freely expressed in periodic elections. In these elections, every person should be free to run for public office as well vote for public office without discrimination or intimidation. This should happen in atmosphere of freely flowing political opinions and information. The votes they freely cast should get fairly and accurately counted. Only by such free and fair elections can people have government that is owned by the people, realizing their right to sovereignty.
    Ensuring free and fair elections usually derives from lot of things during normal times as well, not just election time, such as non-discrimination among citizens, rule of law, free speech, etc. Election time measures include secret ballot, security, etc.
    Many of these derive directly from International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 19 December 19663. India acceded to ICCPR on 10 April 1979 4.
    Some parts of ICCPR 3 directly relevant to free and fair elections are Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 19, Article 21, culminating of course with Article 25 which literally talks about democratic governance and elections. ICCPR is one of the Covenants that created international legal obligations for Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was originally just a moral obligation since 194856. These two, together with one more Covenant and two optional Protocols, are together called the International Bill of Human Rights.
    The gist of free and fair elections which I have presented above, and which I hope is simple,straightforward, accurate and complete enough, is based on many documents related to the same, prepared by international, intergovernmental and non governmental organizations promoting democracy. Some are listed in references789. I could have missed listing some.

  2. Accountable elections:

    Elections may be claimed to be Free and Fair, but there is no basis to this claim if the elections lack accountability. Accountability means every authority and official must have an obligation to report and explain, and be held responsible & answerable for all of their decisions and actions during course of electoral process as well as their consequences.
    This accountability must derive from well defined laws, regulations and procedures that govern the electoral process. And of course, the legislators, the policy-makers and the authorities who frame these laws, regulations & procedures must also be held accountable for developing a framework that can instill confidence in the electoral process and trust in the outcome!
    For such accountability to practically exist, for such answerablity to practically exist, electoral process needs proper accounting, proper tracking as well as consistent and durable record keeping of every activity, every decision, every step. Based on that, observations can be made and answers demanded whether elections followed the correct framework set up for ensuring genuineness and integrity of elections or not.
    Some important areas where consistent, durable records & reports must be maintained by election authorities and officials are given below:

    1. Areas pertaining to the general electoral process:

      • What are the expected and actual outcomes related to election integrity, inclusiveness, efficiency etc?
      • Unambiguous records of fund sources, expenditure, efficiency of operations.
      • What decisions made, by whom, on what basis, and what are the results?
      • What election materials & equipment were procured, from whom and by what criteria?
      • If it was decided to involve private contractors in the electoral process, officials must be answerable for this, even more so if some new election technologies were chosen.
      • Whate are the tenders and other criteria for choosing particular private contractors?
      • Framework for accountability of private contractors and its actual records.

    2. Areas directly pertaining to voting & elections:

      • Consistent, accurate, complete lists of who can vote.
      • Genuine list of who actually voted.
      • Vote counts and raw record of votes that can be authenticated, recounted and audited, particularly by humans.
      • Proof of intact chain of custody of voting equipment, records, etc.
    Of course that is just a list of important items, not an exhaustive list. Accountability should be there in EVERYTHING POSSIBLE when democracy of a nation is at stake! Further, if these records, accounts, reports etc maintained for accountability do not match, or aren't consistent with each other, or are missing, or cannot be inspected, or if 'sum doesn't equal the parts' in some way, then the election was not really an accountable one even if relevant officials or observers or stakeholders certify it to be so. In recent times Election Commissions in India have been extremely lax, opaque and even impudent in many of these aspects. They even deleted some election records from their own website when discrepancies in recent election tallies were pointed out. But we will come to all that in later essays.
    Apart from govt bodies, officials and private contractors related to electoral process, it is also very important to keep all political parties accountable in terms of their finances, because it directly affects, and can damage free and fair elections. Unaccounted money can be used to buy votes, to intimidate voters through paid goons, to spread misinformation and propaganda, to censor media from spreading correct or relevant information, and to overall create unequal unfair advantage to particular parties or candidates. When parties are held accountable for the sources of funding as well as expenditure, citizens can make use of that info also to decide whether interests of a party or candidate and their backers aligns with own interests. (Psst..related to this, the new extremely opaque 'electoral bonds' pushed by our Finance Minister unconstitutionally through Finance Bill 2017 are going to absolutely destroy accountability in political party funding in India, unless we stop them)
    Apart from election authorities, officials, parties and candidates, other entities could also be held accountable to an extent, such as agents and supporters of candidates and parties for their conduct, media for their discourse & reporting, election observers for how they observe and report.
    To understand election accountability and present it to you as simply as I could I used references10111213. I may have forgotten to note some references too.

  3. Transparent elections:

    Elections may be claimed to be Accountable to boost their claim of being Free and Fair but that is also just a sham if the officials and authorities are 'accountable' only to each other and congratulate themselves for the same, with no real democratic oversight. Accountability gets truly enforced only when elections are also transparent to all stakeholders of democracy including candidates, political parties, election observers, voters and all citizens alike.
    In a transparent election, every stakeholder must be able to independently and meaningfully observe, scrutinize and verify that each step of the election was conducted according to procedures and without irregularities, without any missing, unobservable, unverifiable parts or steps.
    This should include, but not be limited to, the following aspects:
    1. There should be full and detailed clarity about electoral process. This should be easily and publicly available, including detail of every procedure and steps involved.
    2. Based on this info, all stakeholders must have full freedom to see and verify and question integrity and accuracy in crucial aspects of voting like
      • Who can vote (voter list)
      • Whether zero votes ensured in voting equipment before voting begins?
      • Who did vote (poll list or participating voter list)
      • Vote counting.
      • Chain of custody of ballots and any other sensitive voting materials, equipment and records.
    3. All stakeholders of democracy must have full access to scrutinize & question all records, trackers, accounts (financial and others) etc which are maintained by election authorities as well as parties and candidates for electoral process accountability.
    4. In case of disputes, records must facilitate end to end audits of election, in full scrutiny of stakeholders. If the records and observables are inconsistent or missing, the election is likely an unreliable fraud. Otherwise stakeholders are likely to be peacefully convinced of the final audit-confirmed results.
    5. There should be full and detailed clarity about the election management bodies (EMB). Their structure, appointment, independence, role and actions should be publicly and easily available.
    6. There should be regular Consultation between policy makers, election bodies, election participants and civil society to evolve more trustworthy electoral processes as well as improve trust in existing ones.

    Only by transparency can public, as voters, have the confidence that elections are free and fair and accountable, with trustworthy results that are an accurate reflection of people's will. Otherwise the government formed has no legitimacy among people.
    To understand election transparency and present it to you as simply as I could I used references1314. I may have forgotten to note some references too.
    This reference 15 provides some understanding on how EVMs destroy transparency (and thus accountability, and thus free and fair election itself) and goes on to provide suggestions like paper trail to bring back transparency in electronic voting too. But frankly those measures can't really ensure transparency, as we will see later.
    For further reading you may also check out principles and code of conduct adopted by UN for election observation and monitoring by citizen orgs16 as well as IFES whitepaper on election audits 17 Of course for our purpose of understanding how EVMs kill transparency, it is not essential to read them, though it should be read and implemented for larger electoral reforms in India
So we have seen the princples of genuine voting and they are nice. How do these come into action in voting process? To understand that, let's first list out the key steps in voting process.
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