Which Articles in the Constitution provide for the electoral system in our country ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), 'Articles 324 to 329'. Elections have a Part of the Constitution to themselves: Part XV, which runs from Article 324 to Article 329. Article 324 vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of the electoral rolls and of the conduct of all elections to Parliament, to the State legislatures and to the offices of President and Vice-President in an Election Commission. Article 325 forbids any person to be excluded from an electoral roll, or claimed to be included in a special roll, on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex, and requires one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency — the provision that abolished the separate electorates of the colonial period. Article 326 lays down adult suffrage as the basis of elections to the House of the People and to the legislative assembly of every State, the qualifying age having been reduced from twenty-one to eighteen by the Sixty-first Amendment. Article 327 gives Parliament the power to make provision by law with respect to elections to the legislatures, the authority under which the Representation of the People Acts of 1950 and 1951 were enacted, and Article 328 gives a State legislature a corresponding power in respect of its own elections so far as Parliament has not provided. Article 329 bars the courts from interfering in electoral matters, providing that the validity of a delimitation law cannot be called in question and that an election to either House of Parliament or of a State legislature may be challenged only by an election petition presented to such authority and in such manner as the appropriate legislature provides. The block therefore begins with the Commission and ends with the mode of challenge, and the range printed in option (2) is exactly it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This range belongs to the Supreme Court, in Part V of the Constitution. Article 124 establishes the Court and provides for the appointment of its judges, Article 125 for their salaries, Article 126 for an acting Chief Justice, Article 127 for ad hoc judges and Article 128 for the attendance of retired judges at sittings of the Court. Nothing in the range concerns elections. It is offered because a candidate who remembers only that some important institution occupies a short numbered block may pick the first such block that comes to mind.  (c) These articles belong to Part XI, in the chapter on administrative relations between the Union and the States: they deal with the obligation of States to comply with laws made by Parliament, the control of the Union over States in certain matters and the power of the Union to entrust its functions to a State. They form part of the machinery of federal administration and have no connection with the conduct of elections. The range is a plausible-looking distractor precisely because it is a short, well-defined block, but the subject is Centre-State relations rather than electoral law.  (d) These articles fall in Part XII and belong to the financial relations between the Union and the States — the requirement of the President's prior recommendation for bills affecting taxation in which States are interested, grants from the Union to certain States, taxes on professions and trades, and the definition of net proceeds. They are the neighbourhood of the Finance Commission article, 280, rather than of the Election Commission article, 324. A candidate who confuses the two Commissions is likely to confuse their article ranges as well, which is exactly the error this option is designed to catch.

Concept: Part XV of the Constitution, comprising Articles 324 to 329, sets up the framework within which Indian elections are held. Its central provision is Article 324, which creates the Election Commission and gives it superintendence, direction and control over the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections to Parliament, to the State legislatures and to the offices of President and Vice-President — elections to local bodies fall outside its remit and belong to the State Election Commissions created by the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments. The Commission consists of the Chief Election Commissioner and such other Election Commissioners as the President may from time to time fix, and it has functioned as a three-member body since 1993. The remaining articles supply the principles and the machinery: one general electoral roll and no exclusion on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex under Article 325; adult suffrage under Article 326, with the voting age reduced to eighteen by the Sixty-first Amendment of 1988; the legislative powers of Parliament and of the State legislatures over elections under Articles 327 and 328, exercised principally through the Representation of the People Acts of 1950 and 1951; and the bar on judicial interference except by election petition under Article 329. Between them the Constitution and the two Acts cover the whole ground — the Act of 1950 dealing largely with the allocation of seats, delimitation and electoral rolls, and the Act of 1951 with the conduct of elections, qualifications and disqualifications, corrupt practices and election disputes.

State PCS 2024 Q80 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q80 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer