Seats with lower turnout or lower absolute vote numbers are not evenly spread but bunched in some states.For instance, all 20 of Kerala’s seats saw the turnout drop and 12 of them recorded fewer votes in EVMs than in 2019. In Uttarakhand, too, all five seats saw lower turnout and three of the six had fewer people voting this time.
In Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, nearly half the seats saw the absolute number of voters declining and almost 90% of the seats in these states recorded lower turnout. Three-quarters of seats in UP and Madhya Pradesh also saw lower turnouts, but only about a third of the seats in these Hindi heartland states recorded fewer votes than in 2019.
In Gujarat, 25% of seats saw fewer votes cast than in ’19
In Gujarat and West Bengal, turnouts were lower than in 2019 in all but one seat in each case, but not a single Bengal seat had fewer voters with the increase in the electorate more than offsetting the drop in turnout. In Gujarat, about a quarter of the seats saw fewer votes cast. Similarly, in Bihar, 21 of the 24 seats recorded lower turnouts than 2019, but only one saw the absolute number of votes go down.
In Maharashtra, 20 of the 48 seats had lower turnouts but only six had fewer people turning up to vote on polling day. Interestingly, of the six seats across the country that had a lower electorate than in 2019 among the 409 being analysed here, five were in Maharashtra and included Pune and Mumbai South. However, only three of the five had fewer votes being cast this time.
Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Odisha, Telangana and West Bengal had no seats with fewer votes this time than in 2019, though all of them had some that recorded lower turnouts. Chhattisgarh was the only major state in which both turnout and absolute vote counts were higher in every seat.
While EC has not put out data on the absolute number of votes cast in each seat, the fact that the electorate is known and the turnout percentage is also known to two decimal places means it is possible to work out an approximate value for votes polled. This analysis is based on that approximation. Of the 428 seats that have polled, only 409 are comparable with 2019 since the 14 seats in Assam and five seats in Jammu & Kashmir have been redrawn since then.