About Six Crore Voters Added in 2024 over 2019

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, Mar 16: The Lok Sabha elections in 2024 will see an increase of about six crore voters, including about 1.8 crore first time voters, over the last elections held in 2019.

The Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar while announcing the Lok Sabha election schedule on Saturday said

96.8 crore electors are set to vote across seven phases of polling to be held between April 19 and June 1, followed by results on June 4.

India’s electorate has grown manifold since its first Lok Sabha election in 1951-52, when there were just 17.32 crore voters. Compared to 2019, the number of registered voters is up by 6% from 91.2 crore. Since the beginning of 2023 alone, the EC has added 2.63 crore new voters.

Of the additional 5.6 crore voters since 2019, 1.8 crore are first-time voters, the EC said, or about 1.9% of the total. Compared to 2019, when there were 1.5 crore first-time voters, enrollment of those aged 18-19 is up by about 20% this year, significant when several issues related to youths, such as unemployment, educational opportunities, are big concerns among voters. Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, first-time voters accounted for a marginally lower share of the electorate at 1.64%. This time, there are also 19.7 crore young voters aged 20 to 29.

The Lok Sabha elections 2024 will involve 10.5 lakh polling stations and 1.5 crore poll officials. More than 55 lakh electronic voting machines (EVMs) will be used in the upcoming elections.

This time, 1.8 crore individuals are expected to cast their vote for the first time. Apart from this, there are 82 lakh voters above the age of 85 in the electoral rolls, 88.4 lakh persons with disabilities, and 19.1 lakh service electors. CEC Rajiv Kumar further noted that there are 948 female voters to every 1,000 male voters.

There has been an upward trend in the registration of women voters with the gender ratio up from 928 in 2019 to 948 now, with men accounting for 49.7 crore voters compared to 47.1 crore women. In 2019, 46.5 crore men and 43.1 crore women formed the electorate. This year, there are 12 states with a gender ratio more than 1,000 compared to 8 states in 2019. Women also account for 85.3 lakh first-time voters.

The number of transgender voters has risen from 39,683 to over 48,000 over the past five years. Of the eligible voters, 49.7 are male, 47.1 crore are female and 48,000 have enrolled as transgender, 88.4 lakh voters are persons with disabilities, and 19.1 lakh are service voters.

In 2019, too, the elections were held across seven phases. This year, the first phase will be the most expansive, covering 21 states and 102 constituencies. Last time, too, the first phase saw the most states go to polls at 20 but it was only in the third phase that the most seats, at 115, voted together.

The number of polling booths is up from 10.35 lakh in 2019 to 10.5 lakh now. The EC is deputing more than 1.5 crore officials and security personnel to oversee voting. In 2019, allegations by the Opposition CPI(M) of voter suppression and threat to its supporters had led to the EC cancelling elections in the Tripura East seat.

The EC also noted the influence of money on polls, highlighting the seizures made during recent state elections. In 11 state Assembly elections in 2022-23, about Rs 3,400 crore in contraband was seized, up by 835% from five years prior.

In Lok Sabha polls, too, seizures spiked from 2014 to 2019, from a total of approximately Rs 1,200 crore to Rs 3,476 crore. In 2014, drugs alone accounted for Rs 804 crore of the total seizures; by 2019, they accounted for Rs 1,280 crore.

In 2019, Tamil Nadu saw the highest value of seizures at Rs 952 crore, followed by Gujarat at Rs 554 crore and Delhi at Rs 430 crore. Notably, polling was cancelled in Tamil Nadu’s Vellore seat after Rs 12 crore in cash was allegedly seized from a DMK leader’s associate.

The 2019 Lok Sabha elections were also held in seven phases, between April 11 and May 19, involving nearly 90 crore voters, and the results were declared on May 23.

For the Lok Sabha polls, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal had the longest voting schedule across seven phases. This was followed by J&K in five phases; Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha in four; Assam and Chhattisgarh in three; and, Karnataka, Manipur, Rajasthan and Tripura in two. The remaining states went to poll in a single phase.

It was the first general election with 100 per deployment of voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) units. A VVPAT produces a printout of the vote cast using an Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), which can be shown to the voter to dispel doubts.

Following is the state-wise Election Schedule: The Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat will go to single phase polling on May 7, overall the third phase, while his Parliamentary constituency Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh will have polling in the seventh and last phase on June 1.