The right to say NO!

Democracy is a great concept. It allows people to say what they want, and gives them a chance to get it. At least this is what the conventional models of democracy are based on.

Democracy is a funny thing. Funny because people often end up getting what they never wanted. Because they never get the chance to say what they do not want.

We have had numerous examples like this in our country ever since it embraced democracy. As an illustration, consider a legislative assembly constituency that has three candidates standing for elections. The mandate is distributed and the relative percentages of votes that each candidate (for our example, A, B and C) gets is 40%, 30%, and 30% respectively. Clearly, none of the candidates has found the support of the majority, and A wins simply because he or she has got more votes than the others.

Now, what if the other 60% (those who did not vote for A) never wanted A to represent them. We have a situation where people have found a leader whom the majority did not want! Ironic it is, right?

It is time that we "modified" the definition of democracy to cover this loophole. Every voter should be asked to select two candidates; one that he or she wants, and the other that he or she would never want. The end result (or worthiness) of a candidate can be measured by simply doing a subtraction between the number of "positive votes" and the number of "negative votes" that one got.

This way we may not get the leaders that we wanted, but we can certainly prevent the ones we did not want to lead us.