Why an LS vote in Lakshadweep is weightier than one in Delhi

Did you know there’s one Lok Sabha constituency where there are almost 200 candidates vying for a single seat? Or that Lakshadweep only has some 58,000 voters electing its lone member of Parliament (MP), while Rajasthan, on the other hand, has a whopping 21 lakh voters electing just one MP?Unless you’re living under a rock or completely disinterested in Indian politics, there's been no escaping headlines on BJP’s decisive victory five years ago – winning 303 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats on its own – and returning to power for a second consecutive term. What may be lesser known is this – in 263 constituencies, the party won by a substantial margin of over 50,000 votes.As the world’s largest democracy, with over 97 crore voters, gets ready to vote from April 19 to June 1, TOI+ brings you interactive maps with data from the 2019 polls that offer interesting insights that possibly hint at what 2024 has in store for us.BJP won more than 50% votes in over 220 seatsIn 2019, BJP had a vote share of more than 50% in as many as 224 of the 303 Lok Sabha seats it won. There were seven seats where its vote share was more than 70%, three of those in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – Surat, Navsari and Vadodara.The other seats where BJP bagged 70+%-vote share – Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, Bhilwara in Rajasthan and Mumbai North in Maharashtra.In 77 seats, the saffron party bagged 60-70% of the total votes. This over-50% vote share on 224 seats is the highest for any single party since 1984.To get a sense of how the party improved its performance compared to 2014, only 136 MPs managed a 50% vote share or higher in that election. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r BJP’s winning margin was over 50k votes in at least 80% of seats it wonIn 263 Lok Sabha seats out of the 303 it won in 2019, the gap between the saffron party and its closest competitor was over 50,000 votes. That make it just 40 seats where the BJP was in a close contest with rivals, including Machhlishahr in UP where it had a lead of 181 votes.BJP also had the highest victory margin overall in the last parliamentary polls, with CR Patil bagging the Navsari seat in Gujarat by a margin of 6.9 lakh votes.Karnal and Faridabad in Haryana, with 6.6 lakh and 6.4 lakh votes each, Bhilwara in Rajasthan (6.1L votes) and Vadodara in Gujarat (5.9L) rounded off the top 5 constituencies where the BJP had the highest victory margins. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r Why an LS vote in Lakshadweep is weightier than one in DelhiMoving away from the BJP, we know each vote counts in an election. But not all votes are equal. That is considering the fact that the number of voters is not the same for all Lok Sabha seats, though the understanding is that so far as practicable all seats should have about the same number of voters.The freezing of seats till 2026 (following the yet-to-be-held Census 2021) means that while it takes 21 lakh voters to elect an MP in the likes of Rajasthan and Delhi, and over 19 lakh voters in Haryana, MP and Telangana, the Lakshadweep MP has a constituency that’s only 58,000-strong — the smallest in India.Besides Lakshadweep, the states with the lowest number of voters per seat: Arunachal (4.4L), Sikkim (4.6L), Goa (5.8L), Mizoram (8.6L) and Manipur (10.2L).In total, there are 97 crore voters in the country electing MPs for 543 seats in the Lok Sabha – that’s an average of 17.9L voters to elect one MP. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r 1 vote, 185 candidates in this constituencyIn one constituency, in particular, there was a problem of plenty in 2019. Electors in Telangana’s Nizamabad constituency were really spoilt for choice – after all, they had a field of 185 candidates from which to pick their representative. Interestingly, prior to the election, Election Commission officials here had to procure over “15 lakh jumbo-size ballot papers and hundreds of boxes” since electronic voting machines (EVMs) could not be used because of the high number of candidates.Belagavi in Karnataka, too, had a heavy roster of Lok Sabha hopefuls numbering 57, though a distant second to Nizamabad, followed by Karur (Tamil Nadu) with 42, Chennai South (Tamil Nadu) with 40 and Thoothukudi, also in TN with 37.Meghalaya’s Tura, on the other hand, had the smallest candidates’ list, with only three names on it. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r In this UP seat, there were more voters than mandated for each polling boothThe Election Commission says there should be a polling booth within a two km-radius of every voter and none should have to deal with more than 1,500 voters.But in 2019, there was at least one seat where the average number of voters per booth exceeded that number. In UP’s Deoria, there were 1,543 voters on average to each booth, followed by Hamirpur (1,406 voters), also in UP, and Ponnani (1,182) in Kerala.Ladakh, Arunachal West and Arunachal East constituencies had the fewest voters per booth at 321, 358 and 375, respectively.The national average was 879 voters per booth in 2019. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r Men rule voters’ list in 3 of every 4 LS seatsPolitics or the boardroom, women’s representation is still not at par with men. There were more women voters than men in only 143 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats in 2019. Nationally, there were about two crore more men on electoral rolls than women.Men outnumbered women by the biggest margin in the Bhind LS seat in Madhya Pradesh, followed by Anantnag in J&K and Sagar constituency, again in MP.Telangana’s Nizamabad constituency, maenehile, had the highest share of women voters across the country, followed by Almora in Uttarakhand and Vadakara in Kerala. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r Research: Richa Gandhi | Source: ECI