Number of voters log a surge, but turnout slips: 2024 data
A comparison of 2024 numbers with earlier elections shows that turnout in 2024 was lower than in 2019.
An increase in number of voters despite a marginal dip in turnout compared to the previous election; an increase in women candidates but a fall in women MPs; and a near-perfect match between the top five parties by parliamentary constituencies and those by the underlying assembly constituencies.
These are among the highlights of the granular data on the 2024 national elections released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday. While most summary numbers of the election are already available, the data, released as part of a report, also provides proportion of rejected votes.
A comparison of 2024 numbers with earlier elections shows that turnout in 2024 was lower than in 2019. At the national level turnout in 2024 stood at 66.1%, 1.3 percentage points lower than in 2019. On a long-term basis, the turnout in 2024 was still the third highest after 2019 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
To be sure, because the registered number of electors increased by 7.4% between 2019 and 2024, the number of voters who turned up to vote increased in absolute terms by 5.3%: from 613.7 million in 2019 to 646.4 million in 2024.
While 646.4 million people turned out to vote in 2024, the number of votes tallied for declaring results on June 4 were only 645.4 million because 1.1 million votes were rejected, compared to 0.51 million in 2019. The data on these rejected votes for 2024 became available only on Thursday. A breakup of rejected votes shows that 535.8 thousand were rejected from among postal votes and 522.5 thousand were rejected from EVMs.Of the 0.51 million votes rejected in 2019, only 3,585 were from EVMs.
While the trends in turnout were largely known soon after polling in each phase, a more interesting result from the data released Thursday is the proportion and performance of women candidates. Out of 8,359 candidates who contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, 800 (9.57%) were women. This means that the number and proportion of women candidates in the 2024 election was the highest ever for a Lok Sabha election since 1962, the earliest comparable Lok Sabha election. Before the 2024 election, this record was held by the 2019 election, when 726 of 8,048 candidates were women (9%).
However, the proportion of women among winner of the 2024 Lok Sabha election decreased compared to 2019. Women accounted for only 13.7% of winners in 2024, compared to 14.4% in 2019, the highest proportion of women winners in a Lok Sabha election. In absolute terms, the number of women winners decreased from 78 in 2019 to 74 in 2024. To be sure, because the number of men contesting is very high, the strike rate of women in this election continued to be higher than men, as has been the case in all Lok Sabha elections.
This gender-wise breakup also shows that almost all big parties failed to give tickets to women in line with the law passed by the parliament last year, which sets side 33% of seats in Lok Sabha and state assemblies for women. This law is expected to come into force only in 2034. Among parties that fielded more than twenty candidates, only two — Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK) and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) – ensured that at least a third were women. To be sure, neither party won a Lok Sabha seat.
The two main parties in contest, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress, fielded only 70 and 41 women candidates, which is 16% and 12% of the 441 and 328 candidates fielded by them. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP and Congress had fielded 55 and 54 women candidates out of a total 435 and 421 candidates, roughly 13% each.
Another interesting set of statistics from the data released on Thursday is the voting patterns at the the level of assembly constituencies (ACs). This shows that the top five winners of the 2024 Lok Sabha election remained the same even at the level of assembly segments,with a slight shift among their relative ranking: the Samajwadi Party (SP) is ranked third in terms of ACs won, ahead of the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC). In terms of Lok Sabha seats, TMC was ahead of SP. The seat share in terms of Lok Sabha seats for the top five parties was 44.2% for the BJP, 18.2% for the Congress, 6.8% for SP, 5.3% for TMC, and 4.1% for Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The top five parties in terms of proportion of assembly segments won are: BJP (43.4%),Congress (20.6%), TMC (4.7%), SP (4.4%), and DMK (3%).
