No to NOTA? Fewer takers for last button, trend suggests further dip

'Voters in reserved constituencies, tribal areas exercise NOTA option to a greater extent than the regular constituencies'

The share of voters pressing the NOTA button has been on a decline in general elections since a Supreme Court order sealed a spot for it on electronic voting machines across India in 2013.

The portion of ‘none of the above’ or NOTA dropped from 1.08 per cent in 2014 general election to 1.06 per cent in 2019 polls.

And, according to an analysis of data from the Election Commission and Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the assembly elections too point towards a similar trend after 2019.

The share of NOTA in the total votes polled remained over 1 per cent in the states that had their assembly elections in 2018, 2019 and 2020, according to data from ADR.

However, in the subsequent years the share of NOTA has declined gradually and remained under one percentage (charts 1,2).

Over a million NOTA votes were polled in the nine states that had their assembly elections in 2023 but they accounted for less than one percentage of the total votes.

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court (SC) had asked the Election Commission to include the option of NOTA in the ballot paper to allow the Indian voter to express their “right to reject”. candidates they consider unworthy of their vote.

In 2018, the apex court had directed the EC to remove the option of NOTA for elections to the Rajya Sabha and the legislative councils.

Anil Verma, head of ADR, says that the intention with which the SC had introduced the NOTA option has not “fructified.”

“They thought that this would create pressure on the political parties to field better candidates. There has been a slew of SC judgments between 2014 and 2018 in which a number of directives were issued to the political parties and the EC in the hope that the number of people with criminal cases would reduce but that has not happened,” he said.

Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Lokniti at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, said that NOTA has “failed” because it has no fallout on the electoral verdict.

“Unless it is attached to some kind of an electoral outcome, people see it as wastage of a vote,” he added.

“For NOTA to have some real effect, a candidate should be debarred from contesting elections for the next 5-6 years if the number of votes under NOTA is more than what the candidate has secured,” Verma said.

A state wise analysis of NOTA votes shows that Tripura and Chhattisgarh had a marginally higher share of NOTA votes compared to the other seven states that had their assembly elections in 2023.

NOTA accounted for about 1.4 per cent of the total votes polled in Tripura and 1.3 per cent of the votes polled in Chhattisgarh.

Just 0.3 per cent of the votes in Nagaland were under the NOTA category, the lowest among the states in 2023. The majority of states which held elections in 2023 saw less than 1 per cent share for NOTA. (chart 3).