As the polling day is upon us, some of the focus should indeed shift to the process of voting and what people of Goa should do to make this truly an exercise in participative democracy.
If a decisive mandate is what people want, then the voting percentage needs to be high. It is always seen that change and decisive mandates happen when the polling percentage touches 85 b% and above,
The Chief Electoral Officer and his team have set a target of 90% polling. For the first time in the country’s history has such high levels of technology been used in the election process. Literally every inch of Goa is under the watch of the big brother Election Commission electronically with live video feeds being transmitted round the clock.
However for the elections to be really a success, Goans of all walks of life must come out and use their skills to influence and mobilise others to vote. To that extent some of Goa’s iconic singers, photographers, artists and musicians, selected as “icons” by the election commission, will be doing exactly that. For instance Akshada Bandekar one of the youth icons for ethical voting has made a 30 second video called ‘Havn Goenkar’. This Konkani video has Hindi and English versions.
Meanwhile former Captain of the Indian Football team Brahmanand Sankhwalkar is the icon for Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP). Brahmanand uses several what’s app groups of football lovers to send his messages on electoral participation which works far better than conventional messaging for information distribution
Aryan Khedekar of the Konkani film industry is lending a voice literally to encouraging people to go out and vote, in remote and far flung colleges of the state. And this is soon becoming a movement
The youth vote is going to be critical to this election and will dominate in more than half the constituencies. The success of this election will pivot completely around how of the earlier disinterested youth of Goa, take part in the exercise as active participants.
And this awareness is being spread both through social media as well as on the ground activity like walkathons with the youth creating awareness.
It will be interesting to see how political parties adapt to this new reality of young voters with heightened awareness of the issues around them. They will no longer vote according to their parents preferences but will make informed choices.
If the young really take part in the voting exercise, they will force political parties to have their policies and vision documents suited to what the needs of the young are because they will be there for politicians to serve for long. Which is why, it will be critical for political parties to tap this segment, map their needs and then undertake the journey with them. Whether a party is young or old, it needs to target the youth with professional precision like never before because they are indeed the future.
Politically the frontal and student organisations of all parties will have to go an overdrive to work with this segment. They have their task cut out. While 2017 will still see traditional voting, 2022 will be an absolute youth driven election.
