Why Election Commission not giving absolute voter numbers matters

For a long time after the general elections concluded in 2019, the Election Commission did not make the final tally of votes available. It was only the “provisional” tally that stayed on the site even after the declaration of results. On May 31, 2019, The Quint reported that two sets of data shared by the EC on its website—“voter turnout” and votes counted on EVMs—did not tally with each other. In several constituencies, votes counted on EVMs were higher than the total voter turnout in those constituencies.

Also Read: ECI chides Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge for his letter on voter turnout data

Waiting for Index Forms

The next day, the EC issued a press release in response, claiming it was waiting for “Index Forms” from each of the 542 constituencies before it could give final numbers. It wrote, based on both the EVM votes and postal ballots counted, the Returning Officer prepares Form 21E and Index Card in which the breakup of voter turnout, including tendered votes for the constituency, is tallied to get the final voter turnout for each constituency.

Form 21E is the return of election as specified under rule 64 of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, for which the sole authority is the returning officer concerned. Also, INDEX CARD in use over the last five decades, is prepared by the returning officer to furnish the voting data (including postal ballot data), polled and counted, after the declaration of the result, which becomes the final authenticated data for all purposes including analysis and research. For general elections 2019, the commission has already directed all the returning officers on March 26, 2019 to send “INDEX CARDS within 15 days of the declaration of the result.”

In a press release, the EC said, “In earlier elections, it used to take months to collect such authenticated election data from all the ROs”— returning officers. “Even in 2014, it took between 2 to 3 months after the declaration of results to collect and collate such data in authenticated form. Due to the innovative IT initiatives taken by the commission this time, the final data on votes counted has been made available within a few days of declaration of results. The reconciliation of voters’ data for all PCs”— parliamentary constituencies — “have been completed in all states and the Index Forms of all 542 PCs are expected to reach ECI from Returning Officers shortly, which after compilation, shall be immediately be made Public by the Election Commission.”

The commission added that the “provisional voter turnout data reported on ECI website is only the tentative number of voters and not the final nos. therefore it is incorrect inference to find Ghost voters when there are none.”

Also Read: Kharge writes to Opposition leaders on ‘discrepancies’ in polling data

Result based on provisional data?

“The Election Commission pulled down the data of final votes polled in phases 1 to 4 of 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, after my story appeared in May 2019,” journalist Poonam Agarwal, then with The Quint, told me for a piece I wrote for The Caravan. After six months, the EC put out the final data, in October, which tallied with votes counted on EVMs. “If it took the EC six months to compile the complete data,” Agarwal asked, “Does that mean they declared Lok Sabha Election results based on provisional data? After I pointed out the discrepancy in votes polled and votes counted data, the Election Commission has stopped sharing this information entirely in the subsequent elections.”

On November 15, 2019, the election-watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and the NGO Common Cause moved the Supreme Court calling for an investigation into the alleged discrepancies in the voter-turnout data. The petitioners asked for “a court order directing the Election Commission of India to conduct actual and accurate reconciliation of (votes) data before the declaration of the final result of any election,” and called for an investigation of all such discrepancies. Raising concerns on the election process, the petition stated: “The infirmities in the existing system of conducting elections, by declaring the election results even before the authenticated election data is released by the Election Commission, is far more serious and an alarming trend and therefore, cannot be disregarded.”

The petitioners pointed out in the Supreme Court that there were as many as six seats where the discrepancy in votes was higher than the winning margin. A table enclosed with the petition listed out the constituencies — for instance, in Anantnag, votes counted in EVMs exceeded the voter turnout by 29,746 votes, while the winning margin was only 6,676 votes. Such discrepancies may not be big enough to alter the final national result but, as the ADR co-founder Jagdeep Chhokar told me then, in an atmosphere of sharp political contestation, they damage the credibility of the process.

Also Read: INDIA bloc leaders meet EC over voter turnout data

Vying with media

According to a former EC official who prefers to stay unnamed, the discrepancies were a result of the commission’s desire to get ahead of the media, which reports leads and counts before the result is officially declared. The official said that the EC “walked into a mess of its own making by trying to compete with the media and the dissemination game, by relaying what the minute-by-minute leads were, other than what it puts out on the website.” Despite objections from at least one of the election commissioners who asked for restraint, the EC released the voter turnout app on April 23, 2019. The numbers on the app did not tally perfectly with the final results on the EC’s website, according to the official. While discrepancies were few, the official said, “everything ended up getting questioned. Earlier, when we uploaded just a final statistic, everyone believed it.”

ADR has again gone to the Supreme Court to seeking a direction to the EC to immediately upload account of votes recorded of all polling stations after the close of polling of each phase. The matter is set to be heard on May 17, Friday.

The plea wants the Election Commission to also “provide tabulated polling station-wise data in absolute figures of the number of votes polled as recorded, in Form 17C Part- I, after each phase of polling in the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections and also a tabulation of constituency-wise figures of voter turnout in absolute numbers”. The plea also prayed for uploading on the EC website the scanned legible copies of Form 17C Part- II which contained the candidate-wise result of counting after the compilation of results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

ADR has said that without the absolute number of voter turnout data, the general public cannot compare the number of votes polled with the number of votes counted as announced in the results and thus, discrepancies, if any, in the two sets of data (number of votes polled at polling booths and number of votes counted by EVM) can only be assessed when absolute numbers, and not percentages, for each constituency are released by the EC.

According to the latest data released by the Election Commission on Thursday, May 16 the total turnout in the first four phases of the Lok Sabha elections has been recorded at 66.95%. Further, the commission added that 45.10 crore of the nearly 97 crore voters have voted so far in the ongoing elections – but did not release phase-wise or constituency-wise numbers of voters. Notably, the Chief Electoral Officer of Assam has released the cumulative voter numbers till the third phase and the EC should follow suit and do so for the whole country.

(Published with permission from The Wire).