Representativeness of elections in IndiaJagdeep S. Chhokar[footnoteRef:1] [1: jchhokar@gmail.com]

May 2015Let us look at a hypothetical scenario. For ease of calculation and understanding, let us assume that a constituency has 100 eligible and registered voters. It is important to remember that the number 100 is that of people who are eligible and actually registered to vote, or, in other words, whose names exist on the electoral roll, or what is commonly called voter list. Let us further assume that there are six candidates contesting a particular election in this constituency. Given that voter turnout is usually around 50 to 60 per cent in most elections (thought it does exceed 70 per cent in once in a while), taking the voter turnout to be 60 per cent, 60 out of the 100 registered voters actually vote in the election, making the votes polled to be 60. With six candidates in the fray, if one of the candidates gets 11 votes, four get 10 votes each, and one gets 9, the one who gets 11 votes wins, and this win is considered legitimate making this person legally the elected representative for that constituency. What gets missed out are some vital facts such as the elected person got only 11 divided by 60, i.e. 18.33 per cent of the votes polled, or, in other words, only 18.33 percent of those who voted, voted in his/her favour. The flip side of this is that 60-11= 49 people can be effectively perceived to have voted against the candidate who was elected. 49 out of 60 works out to 81.67 per cent! This is when we consider only the votes polled. If we look at the registered votes, then we find that out of the total of 100 registered voters, only 11 have voted in his/her favour, which means that 100-11=89, or 89 per cent did not vote for this candidate! Can we call a person who has got the active support of only 11 per cent of the total registered voters in a constituency, the duly elected, or truly representative of the constituency? The answer is left with the reader. The next question, which also each of the readers will need to answer for themselves, is whether it is reasonable to even expect such a person to look after the interest of the entire constituency, or the entire electorate of the constituency.

Why and how does this happen?This happens because of the first-past-the-post system of election that we have adopted. This system when seen in the context of multiplicity of political parties, results in such anomalous outcomes. Leaving the hypothetical example described above behind, actual data is not much different. In the last Lok Sabha election in 2014, a total of 331 Lok Sabha MPs (out of 543, i.e. 60.95%) were elected with less than 50% of the votes cast/polled, out of which 239 (44.01%) were elected with votes cast/polled between 41-50%, 99 (18.23%) were elected with less than 40% of the votes cast/polled, and 4 (0.007%) were elected with less than 30% of the votes cast/polled.

If we consider the total number of registered voters, then the percentages are even more revealing. In this case, 539 out of 543 (99.26%) were elected with less than 50% of thetotal registered voters in their constituency, out of which only 37 (a mere6.81%) were elected withtotal registered voters in their constituencybetween 41-50%, 475 (87.47%) were elected with less than 40%total registered voters in their constituency, 211 (39%) were elected with less than 30% oftotal registered voters in their constituency, and 19 (0.034%) were elected with less than 20 % oftotal registered voters in their constituency.

It should be clear by now that the current system results in something like 70 percent or more votes, which indeed is the majority, going waste; and this proportion of the electorate is left without representation or voice in the elected body, Parliament or State Legislatures. How representative such elected representatives are of the entire electorate does not require much imagination.

Another outcome of the first-past-the-post election system is that often a party with as little as 30-35 percent of the total votes cast in the country can end up with as much as 70-75 percent of the seats in Parliament or State Assembly, whereas another party which may have polled 27-28 percent of the votes, might get only about 25 percent of the seats. As a psephologist would say, a swing of 2 to 3 percent in votes can result in a huge difference in the number of seats won. As we know, though the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got only 31% of the votes cast in the 2014 election to the Lok Sabha, it won in 282 out of 543 (51.93%) of the seats. The outcome of the 2015 Assembly election in Delhi was even more bizarre. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won 95.71% of the seats (67 out of 70) with only 54.3% of the votes cast. The case of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is even more curious. It got the third highest percentage of votes at 4.1% (after BJP-31% and Congress-19%) but it did not get a single seat. In its stronghold, Uttar Pradesh (UP), it got nearly 20% of the votes, again remaining third (with BJP-42.3% and Samajwadi Party-22.2%) but failed to get even one of its candidates elected.

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