Wrong call by the EC

A law against buying votes will be impossible to implement

Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Nasim Zaidi has repeated the commission’s hope that the government will accord it the power to countermand an entire election if it detects an attempt to “bribe” voters. Mr Zaidi has said that seizures of cash and liquor during the ongoing Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur are three times as much as was seized in the 2012 iterations of the polls. This is a signifier of the magnitude of the problem, even after the demonetisation of 86 per cent of outstanding currency in November 2016 was supposed to have crimped the