Three important questions about voting in this election.

900 million or 90 crore people in India will be eligible to vote in the Indian general elections happening from April 11th to May 19th.

To put that into context: [1]

• That’s more citizens eligible to vote than the total population of the third, fourth, and fifth most populous countries of the world combined.
• There will be more polling stations (1 million) in the elections than the total population of 73 countries in the world.
• There will be more citizens on election duty (10 million) than the total population of over 100 hundred countries in the world.

It might seem like in this massive democratic activity, your individual vote matters little. You are mistaken if you think so. Each and every vote counts in every election. It is how people share their preferences. It is important that we all participate in this exercise in democracy.

I am going to discuss a few questions that usually come to people’s mind around election time. I have tried to share perspective around those. This is not going to be about any political party or politician. This is for every voter.

Question 1: Should I vote for a party or my local representative?

This question is tricky. There is a small percentage of voters who are aware of the different politicians standing for elections in their constituency. Fewer still know/care about what the views of that politician are on the big issues.

In India, because of anti-defection law, unfortunately candidates of a political party cannot vote for laws which their party is against. It means that when voting over a new bill happens in the parliament, all members of a single party have to vote together. Individual members of the party do not get to choose on their own. It means that irrespective of the views of the candidate, party’s stand on something matters more.

So voting for a party makes sense, right? Not exactly. In India, parties do not have clearly demarcated beliefs. There are a few parties which are left leaning and right leaning but their voting patterns in parliament vary from situation to situation. Even though parties beliefs are not crystal clear, there are general trends that parties follow while voting for laws. You could use those trends to pick a party which represents your beliefs.

Hence I believe that you should choose a party you want to vote for and not individuals.

Question 2: What if my preferred party is too small and won’t win for sure? Whom should I vote for in that case?

I would suggest ranking parties that are standing for elections in your constituency based on how aligned they are to your beliefs. Once you have that, you should rank them by likeliness of winning based on past record and current trends.

If you think your first preference party is very likely to win your constituency, you can just vote for your first preference and hope that the trends play out.

If you think your first preference party and another party might be neck and neck in terms of votes, you can vote for your preferred party so as to give it a chance to win the neck and neck race.

If you think that the party that you prefer the most has almost no chance of winning, you should pick the party which is second on your preference list but has a high chance of winning. This way you would have to keep going down your preference list until you reach a party which has atleast a fighting chance to winning.

Some people call it choosing between the lesser evil but I feel that is a very negative way of looking at things. There is no way that 1.4 billion people are going to get the party that way their first preference.

Hence, vote for a party that’s closest to your vision and has the best chance of winning.

Question 3: If I find none of the parties worthy, should I vote for NOTA or stay at home and not vote?

If you don’t vote and stay at home, you give up control over who becomes your representative. No one knows what you want or what you stand for or what kind of representative you want. People can assume that you don’t care about the elections or about being represented.

If you vote for NOTA, you send a signal to the candidates who are standing for elections that you think that none of them are good enough and that you would rather choose no one rather than vote for any one of them.

Voting for NOTA also sends a signal to other ‘aspiring’ candidates and parties that there is a group of citizens who care enough to go to voting booths and vote but don’t have anyone representing their beliefs. Political entrepreneurs would be encouraged by seeing this and hopefully enter the political arena or change their tracks in case they are already in the field. It would also nudge current politicians to change their beliefs to get these votes.