Votes are the currency of an election. Every vote polled is the right of a citizen exerted and the results decide who represents the people. This cannot be trivialized. There are various sources of information regarding votes cast and counted that provide checks against malpractice in determining the will of the people. It is concerning that the Election Commission itself appears to take its role with little seriousness.
This post looks at how the various datasets compare with each other and whether the numbers on record match – ensuring that the counting has been conducted in a secure manner.
The Election Commission has published final vote counts for each Phase with state level voter turnout numbers. Therefore, this post tallies all other constitution level data by state for each phase.
Resources:
Final voter turnout on official website. This data has now been deleted and replaced by provisional data. The link now points to the archived page as it was when it offered final turnout data. The files offered for download may be found here. This data is analyzed in Analyzing Official EVM data – map added on demand!
The newly uploaded provisional state level voter turnout data on the official Election Commission of India website. This data is analyzed in Checking the latest provisional data from the Election Commission of India (with map)
Documents with detailed voter turnout data for Phases 1-4 published on the official website, but deleted after questions were raised about the figures not matching votes counted. Archived copies may be accessed here. This data is analyzed in EVM Discrepancies Map (According to data published and deleted by ECI)
The Election Commission of India’s official voter turnout app. This data is difficult to consider reliable, as it would be published by the developer of the app and not necessarily officials accountable for correct counting. Additionally, there are multiple claims of the data on the app being updated after the results. However, this data does often match the EVM votes counted and is the basis of the claim of supporters of the regime that there are no anomalies. So we compare this data as well for Phases 1-6. This data is analyzed in Comparison of Constituency-level “votes polled” & “votes counted” data #GeneralElections2019 #InteractiveMap
There is no constituency level voter turnout number available for any of the constituencies in Phase 7, therefore, only the state level turnout numbers are compared with totals of EVM votes counted by corresponding state and phase.
Data of EVM votes counted is obtained from the official results website of the Election Commission.
Those who are verifying the data may use this file. It also contains information on totals of EVM votes reported in the app as well as the votes polled according to the data now deleted by the ECI. You can use this file for constituency level data. Please note, this has been manually copied – hundreds and hundreds of numbers reported in different places, separate pages – by volunteers. Errors are possible, though we have made an effort to check. In the event you find one, please report it here in comments.
We urge you to download the documents and verify the data and report any errors you find, so that we may collectively have robust information to base conclusions on.
What is immediately clear is that apart from the voter turnout app that has also been updated after the result, it is rare for data to match. An EVM is a precise gadget. Any error is evidence that the data is compromised. And the map below shows that there isn’t a single state or Union Territory in the country – including single constituency states and territories! – where all numbers line up.
If this isn’t evidence that the election is compromised, it is hard to say what would be.
Special thanks to Jaya Sengupta, Ashlin Matthew and Aloke Ghosh for a lot of heavy lifting related to compiling the data used in all the Lok Sabha election analysis posts.