 "LS polls: Nota is Indore's runner-up candidate with record 218,674 votes")
Lok Sabha elections 2024 result: The Indore constituency in Madhya Pradesh has set a new record with the highest ever number of Nota votes polled at 218,674, the final result on the Election Commission website showed.
Nota or ‘None of the Above’ is an option available on the voting machine, which allows voters to formally express their rejection of all running candidates. It was introduced during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Nevertheless, the Bharatiya Janata Party won the seat with its contestant and incumbent MP Shankar Lalwani having secured 1,226,751 votes. Lalwani won by a margin of 1,175,092.
To be clear, Nota option does not have any electoral value. Even if it gets the highest number of votes, the candidate getting the most of the remaining votes is declared the winner.
Notably, the Congress candidate from Indore, Akshay Kanti Bamb, had withdrawn his name during nominations and subsequently joined the BJP.
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According to a report by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and National Election Watch (NEW), the highest number of Nota votes in Lok Sabha elections stood at 51,660 in Gopalganj (SC) constituency in Bihar till 12 noon.
Among state assembly elections, Nota has secured the highest percentage of votes in 2020 at 1.46 per cent (7,49,360 votes) in two state assembly elections of Bihar (7,06,252 votes) and NCT Delhi (43,108 votes).
Overall, a total of 129 million votes have been cast for Nota in the past five years in state and general elections, the report published in August 2022 said.
ADR has suggested that in cases when the votes polled for Nota are higher than all the contesting candidates then no candidates should be declared as elected and a fresh election should be conducted, in which none of the earlier candidates should be allowed to contest.