Electoral Example

India’s election machinery has long been treated by its domestic critics as a convenient punching bag. Now, rather unexpectedly, America appears to be taking notes from its. U.S, President Donald Trump recently used a routine meeting between his ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to pitch his proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.

The legislation, pending in the US Senate since last year, would require prospective voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship before registering for federal elections. Trump claimed that Kumar had asked how America could conduct elections without valid photo identification. Whether or not that question was posed in precisely those terms, the larger point is difficult to miss. India, with all its electoral imperfections and political controversies, runs one of the world’s largest democratic exercises through a system whose scale and administrative robustness are widely recognised.

India’s 2024 general election involved some 646 million voters. The overwhelming majority voted in person, using an Electors Photo Identity Card or one of a dozen approved alternative documents. Postal voting remains restricted to specified categories, while voters above 85 and persons with disabilities can vote from home under official supervision. The result is an electoral system that combines enormous scale with an unusually high degree of physical verification.

America’s system is markedly different. Elections are decentralised, with states setting many of their own rules. Postal voting is vastly more common. The federal election machinery is also far less centralised than India’s Election Commission.

That makes the American interest in India’s practices worth noticing. The proposed SAVE Act would require voters to produce documents such as a passport or birth certificate to establish citizenship. American circumstances make this considerably more complicated. Around half of Americans do not have a passport, while many women have surnames that differ from those on their birth certificates after marriage.

There is an irony here. At precisely the moment when an American president is holding up aspects of India’s electoral system as something worth emulating, India’s principal Opposition party has chosen to mock the very institution administering it. The Congress has had plenty of legitimate grounds to scrutinise the Election Commission, particularly over the contentious Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls under Kumar. Deleting large numbers of names, or failing to explain such exercises adequately, deserves vigorous democratic scrutiny. But criticism of an institution is not the same thing as ridicule of its constitutional authority or its office-holder.

For decades, India has conducted elections involving hundreds of millions of citizens across an immense, diverse and often difficult country, with paper trails, voter identification and an independent constitutional machinery at its core.

The spectacle of Washington debating whether it should adopt safeguards that India already uses should inspire less triumphalism than reflection. But Congress might at least notice the compliment. When America looks to India for electoral lessons, perhaps India’s politicians should stop treating its election machinery as a joke.