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A study that sent four voter information messages on the mobile phones of randomly-selected voters in more than 3,800 villages in Uttar Pradesh in the run up to the 2017 assembly elections found a drop of 12% in votes cast for candidates facing criminal charges, which amounted to a 3-percentage-point decline in their vote-share.
This decline in vote-share is significant because in nearly 20% of the seats contested across UP in 2017, the winner was decided by a margin of 3 percentage points or less, the study, Coordinating Voters against Criminal Politicians: Evidence from a Mobile Experiment in
