How NOTA worked in the assembly elections

Data indicates that in the presence of a credible alternative, people are unlikely to choose NOTA

The recently held assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan were the first where voters had the option to reject all candidates by voting for “none of the above” (NOTA). The option, however was simply hypothetical—votes marked to “none of the above” would simply be ignored while deciding the winner, and it wouldn’t matter even if over half the votes were for NOTA.

Figure 1 shows the median vote share of NOTA in each state that went to the polls.

It is interesting to note that the median vote share of NOTA was the least in Delhi, a state where one would expect to find the most educated voters among the states that went to polls. What makes this statistic interesting is that apart from NOTA, these elections also marked the rather spectacular debut of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi.

In the run up to the elections, AAP projected itself as a “party with a difference” and its presence is credited with the sharp increase in the voting percentage in Delhi in these polls. Taken together with the above data, it indicates that in the presence of a credible alternative, people are unlikely to vote for NOTA. From this perspective, the presence of NOTA on the electronic voting machine is useful for judging the credibility of the candidates and parties contesting in a constituency.

Before the introduction of NOTA, how did voters register their protest against the candidates and parties in their constituency? One way was to not vote at all. The other was to cast the votes in favour of a small party or an independent. The question is whether people are still doing that given the option of NOTA. In order to “measure” this, we look at the vote share of NOTA against the number of candidates in a particular constituency. Figure 2 shows this plot by state.

The trend is clear—the more the number of candidates in a constituency, the lesser the vote share for NOTA.

Next, we will examine the impact of NOTA on the margins of victory. The analysis here is fairly rudimentary—in how many constituencies was the margin of victory less than the number of votes polled by NOTA? The answer is 56. Of these 26 are in Madhya Pradesh, 15 in Chhattisgarh, 11 in Rajasthan and four in Delhi. Given that the Chhattisgarh assembly has 90 seats, one-sixth of all its seats were decided by a margin less than the number of votes polled by NOTA in those constituencies. In Madhya Pradesh, this proportion fell to one-tenth, and it was closer to one-twentieth in Rajasthan and Delhi.

Figure 3 shows the constituencies where NOTA played the biggest spoiler—i.e. where the difference between votes polled by NOTA and the margin of victory was maximum.