 "vote, election, voting")
At nearly 63 per cent, the average voter turnout on the 58 seats that went to polls on Saturday in the penultimate phase of the elections was 1 percentage point lower than five years ago, according to the data available on the Election Commission’s (EC’s) voter turnout app on Sunday.
The sharpest drop of nearly 8 percentage points was seen in Haryana where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had swept all ten seats in 2019. Haryana is scheduled for Assembly polls in October.
However, electors in the Kashmir Valley continued to witness a surge in voter turnout. The voter turnout in Anantnag, the third and last of the Lok Sabha seats in the Kashmir Valley to vote, was a high of 54.46 per cent. Five years ago, the Anantnag seat recorded 8.98 per cent turnout, the worst in the country.
The turnout registered on Saturday is not comparable to the 2019 figure since the constituency’s boundaries have changed after delimitation, and now include Jammu’s Rajouri and Poonch.
The EC pointed out that the voter turnout in Anantnag, Poonch, Kulgam, Rajouri and Shopian partially, was the highest since 1989, or in 35 years. The voter turnout in Srinagar (38.49 per cent) and Baramulla (59.1 per cent), which had voted on May 13 and 20, respectively, was also the highest in many decades. Jharkhand’s Jamshedpur and Dhanbad almost matched their respective voter turnouts of five years back, while the turnouts in Bhubaneswar and Puri improved over 2019 while it was nearly the same in Sambalpur.
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The voter turnout in Delhi dropped by almost 2 percentage points if compared with 2019. It stood at 65.1 per cent in 2014.
