Unit 2: Fundamentals of Election
2.1 Introduction to Voter Roll
The voter roll (the electoral register) = the list of the entitled — the franchise’s operational document. Nepal’s system: the Election Commission’s roll (Article 246’s voters’-list duty), prepared and continuously updated from the biometric registration (the fingerprint-and-photo registration at the local level; the voter ID card); the eligibility entry — the citizen of 18 years (Article 84’s vote age; the ward-level registration); the roll’s disciplines: the absence of duplicates (the biometric de-duplication), the no-service-personnel bar? no — the modern universal entry; the correction-and-objection procedure (the claims-and-objections window before final publication — the roll’s due process); the roll’s public display; and the special problems: the unregistered migrant workers (the absent-voter debate), the citizenship-document barriers (the naturalised-and-by-descent edge cases — Fundamental Rights, Semester 3), the seasonal-and-internal migrants, and the duplications-and-the-dead (the roll’s hygiene scandals).
2.2 Qualification of Voters, Candidates
The voter: Nepali citizen; 18 years on the qualifying date; the registration in the roll of the constituency of residence. The candidate (Article 87’s ladder and the statutes’ detail): citizen; 25 years for the House of Representatives, 35 for the National Assembly, 21 for local bodies; the nomination’s mechanics (the proposer-and-seconder signatures; the deposit — the Act’s security, forfeited below the vote threshold); the disqualifications: conviction of moral-turpitude offences with unserved sentence (Article 87’s own bar — the Kamlesh Dwivedi case’s principle: it takes a judicial decision, not an inquiry commission’s report, to disqualify), the office-of-profit bar, mental incapacity, undischarged insolvency-faces (the Act’s list); the candidacy’s own limits (one candidacy in one’s own name — the anti-hedging rule; the resignation-required bar for the office-holders). The EC’s final word: the candidacy-legitimacy decisions are the Commission’s (Article 246’s text) — subject to the writ jurisdiction.
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