Over the years, several committees set up by the union government, Law Commission reports, and the Election Commission itself have proposed wide-ranging electoral reforms such as issues related to the criminalisation of politics, electoral financing, the autonomy of the Election Commission, Anti-defection law, paid news, simultaneous elections, Right to reject, Model code of conduct etc. that we will discuss in this article.

Criminalisation of Politics

• The criminalisation of politics has been at the forefront of the electoral reforms proposed by several commissions, including the Election Commission and Law Commission.
• As per the reports of the Association for democratic reform, the number of tainted representatives has been increasing with each Lok Sabha. In the current Lok Sabha (17^th), 43% of representatives have some kind of criminal charges on them, of which 29% of them face serious criminal charges like rape, whereas, in the 16^th Lok Sabha, the percentage of representatives with criminal charges stood as 34%.