As NDA basks in the glory of 353 seat mark in the Lok Sabha Election 2019 tally and Congress slides back to its den to lick its wounds, for the rest of us it is time to devour the sea of data made available by the Election Commission.
How NDA pulled this miracle especially in states where they just lost, and in West Bengal and Telangana in itself a subject which merits a hundred data-backed analysis pieces.
The Andaman seat, in particular, was rather interesting. Andaman was a head to head contest between INC and BJP. Congress’ Kuldeep Sharma polled 95,308 votes in total and BJP’s Vishal Jolly polled 93,901. Congress won by a margin of mere 1407 votes. But here is the shocker, NOTA polled 1412 votes.
So we dug a little deeper (542 constituencies deep) and found how many constituencies are there in this election where the victory margin is less than NOTA votes. We found in all 21 seats, though many more seats were really close too, the NOTA votes weren’t more than victory margin.
So here’s the list of these 21 seats:
If you are looking for patterns here, especially if you are a BJP supporter looking for a pattern here, you could argue BJP lost 5 seats due to NOTA while it won in 7 seats due to NOTA. Congress lost 5 and gained 5.
One of the most interesting seats was that of Machhlishahr where BJP won with just a margin of 181 votes. The NOTA votes polled there were 10,830.
Another seat of Arambagh, West Bengal, NOTA votes polled were much higher than the margin from which BJP lost. BJP lost by a margin of 1142 votes whereas the NOTA votes polled in that constituency were 20,495 votes.
Also contrary to perception NOTA doesn’t seem to be a case of mostly urban middle-class voters but is seen even in tribal and rural areas.
