On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:49 AM, Srini Ramakrishnan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > India is anti-mobility. If you've only ever lived at the same address > for ages can you get all the government paperwork together for your > vote, and even then it's a tough bureaucratic wrestle. In an age when > news and information literally moves at the speed of light, and > people's lives are no longer rooted to one spot, it's a very efficient > way of isolating the thinkers. >
There is no national identity card system.. which probably makes having a dynamic voter registry impossible. (I have a PDS Ration-Card which I then used to get a voter's ID card (though when i recieved the voter-id card, it had someone else's picture on it...). The funny thing about the ration card is that it doesnt even have my photograph on it... ) In Kenya there is a national identity card system which dates back to the controls of the colonial period. The voter registry is quite mobile, you can register to vote anywhere in the country if you have a national id card... But whats happened here is that this system has been heavily abused to rig the demographics of different voter constituencies and wards (e.g. Politican 'X' knows constituency 'A' has a heavy tilt towards a candidate of 'Z' tribe... so during voter registration he mobilizes people of his tribe to register in 'A' constituency even if they don't live there....)
