A woman collects her voter slip before casting her vote at a polling station during the sixth phase of the general election, in New Delhi.
Credit: Reuters Photo
New Delhi: The Election Commission finally released the actual count of votes cast in the first five phases of Lok Sabha elections, which showed that 66.39 per cent or 50.72 crore of 76.4 crore people have exercised their franchise.
Till phase 4, the EC had said earlier, 66.95 per cent or 45.1 crore of 67.45 crore people had voted till then. During the latest polls, the highest turnout was seen in phase 4 when it recorded 69.16 per cent while the least was 62.2 per cent during the fifth phase.
The highest votes were cast in Assam’s Dhubri where 24.5 lakh out of 26.6 lakh (92.08 per cent) people voted followed by Telangana’s Malkajgiri where 19.19 lakh out of 37.79 lakh (50.78 per cent) people voted. Incidentally, Malkajgiri had the highest number of voters in the first five phases.
Bangalore Rural came third in the number of votes cast – 19.14 lakh out of 28.02 lakh people voted.
After Malkajgiri, Bangalore North had the highest number of voters in a seat at 32.14 lakh – of this 17.5 lakh voted – followed by UP’s Ghaziabad at 29.45 lakh – only 14.69 lakh or 49.88 per cent voted.
However, these numbers would see some changes when postal votes are added.
The data showed that 97 out of 427 seats – excluding Surat where the BJP candidate was elected unopposed – had more than 20 lakh voters.
The release of the data came on a day the phase 6 polling was on and hours after around 100 retired bureaucrats asked the EC to release the actual vote cast data among other things.
The EC said it felt “duly strengthened” by the observations and the verdict of the Supreme Court on Friday about the process of release of turnout data, after it turned down the plea for making public Form 17C, which provides data of votes cast in all polling stations.
Anjali Bharadwaj, who is a governing body member of Common Cause that petitioned the SC along with ADR on Form 17C, said, “big victory for peoples' Right to Information! ECI releases voter turnout figures in absolute numbers. Important step by ECI, though this could have been done sooner. The demand to disclose Form 17C must continue as that is the only statutory authenticated record of voter turnout.”
There has been demand since the first phase of polls on April 19 to release the actual number of voters in constituencies and the actual number of those who cast their votes. So far, the EC did not provide data of actual votes cast but from May first, it started giving the number of total voters in each seat after activists and Opposition politicians raised concerns. The 11-day delay in the release of voter turnout data of phase 1 also triggered controversy.
According to the data, the least number of votes were in Lakshadweep where 57,784 were eligible to vote. Of this, 48,630 or 84.16 per cent cast their votes.
In the six Mumbai seats, all except Mumbai North (10.33 lakh of 18.11 lakh) did not cross the ten lakh mark. The least was in the elite Mumbai South where only 7.69 lakh out of 15.26 lakh people voted. All Mumbai seats had more than 14.7 lakh voters.
Incidentally, the data also showed that the seven constituencies, including Lakshadweep and Ladakh, that had less than five lakh votes had better turnout – between 64.1 and 84.16 per cent.