Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh NOTA Analysis : Was it Expensive Star Campaigns or Unreliable Candidates?

In Dec 2017, two states of India, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh witnessed assembly elections. In both states, major fight was between two main parties Bhartiya Janta Patry (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC). Irrespective of the winner, None Of The Above (NOTA) played different roles in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. Before going into details of votes against NOTA, let's see what exactly NOTA is: 

On Sept 27, 2013, After the Supreme Court judgement in Writ Petition (C) No. 161 of 2004; Election Commission of India has introduced the provision of "None Of The Above (NOTA)" in the ballot papers and EVMs. After this provision, a voter can reject all the running candidates and choose to vote none of the above. This provision only gives a chance to voters to reject all the candidates but it doesn't lead to re-election even if number of votes against NOTA are the highest. The candidate who secure maximum votes wins.  

So, NOTA does not play any direct role in elections, but it definitely signifies the importance of all other candidates contesting election in a constituency. If the contesting candidates deserve votes based on their party or personal profile, vote share is widely distributed among candidates but what if there is only one or two dominant candidates and a large portion of voters voted NOTA? Can we say that except one or two leading candidates, other candidates were not deserving or they failed to convey their ideas and agendas. What about a constituency with only two contesting candidates and a large section of voters voted NOTA? This is clearly an alarming situation. Here is an analysis of the number of NOTA votes in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. 

Number of Candidates per Constituency 

Gujarat is almost triple in size (182 seats) to Himachal Pradesh (68 seats). Final tally from Election Commission of India (ECI) shows that total 1.84% voters voted NOTA in Gujarat and 0.90% in Himachal Pradesh. Imagine NOTA as a separate party, which gets third largest vote share in Gujarat (pretty exciting news for them) whereas it was not the case in Himachal Pradesh. Election campaigns concluded that Gujarat is a more politically active (why not, there are more number of seats) territory than Himachal Pradesh. An average of 11.04* and 5.99* candidates contested on each seat in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh respectively. Gujarat constituencies have a variation of number of candidates from 3* to 35* and Himachal Pradesh 3* to 13*. Standard deviation of total number of candidates per constituency also confirm the variation in the number of candidates (Fig. 1).  

* NOTA is counted as 1 contesting candidate 

Fig. 1. Average number of candidates per constituency in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh 

Rank of NOTA among Candidates 

With an average 11.04* and 5.99* candidates per constituency in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh respectively, NOTA ranked between 3* and 9* in both Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. But the average position of NOTA in Gujarat was 3.58* which was higher than  4.43* in Himachal Pradesh (Fig. 2). This signifies that there were larger number of constituencies in Gujarat where NOTA was ranked at either 3* or 4*. This is also supported by standard deviation of NOTA ranks in Gujarat (STD of 0.97, more precise/consistent) and Himachal Pradesh (STD of 1.19, less precise/consistent). Voters in Himachal Pradesh voted for different candidates from different parties and chose to vote NOTA less than Gujarat (Fig. 2). 

3.46% voters (5265 votes) voted NOTA in Jhalod, Gujarat where only 2 candidates contested and INC candidate won by 25410 votes (16.72% of total votes) 

1.16% voters (624 votes) voted NOTA in Jhanduta, Himachal Pradesh where only 2 candidates contested and BJP candidate won by 4962 votes (9.24% of total votes) 

* NOTA is counted as 1 contesting candidate 

Fig. 2. Average position of NOTA among other candidates in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh 

Position Counts of NOTA 

As discussed above, rank of NOTA among all candidates for a given constituency is higher and more consistent in Gujarat than Himachal Pradesh (Fig 2). There were 63.2% seats in Gujarat and 20.6% seats in Himachal Pradesh where NOTA was ranked 3. NOTA was at 4th place in 24.2% constituencies in Gujarat and 39.7% constituencies in Himachal Pradesh. Securing 3rd place in 63.2% seats of an assembly raises many questions about the credibility of politicians (Fig. 3). However, there was no constituency where NOTA got maximum votes.

Fig. 3. Overall position of NOTA in all the constituencies of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh 

Conclusion 

In conclusion, voters in the state of Gujarat with a large number of total candidates and seats couldn't find a good alternative (or third party) and a large section of voters voted  for NOTA. Whereas, in a small state of Himachal Pradesh with less number of candidates and seats, voters opted to vote for other candidates and only 20.6% constituencies had NOTA as the third most preferred option. There can be two possible reasons behind this imbalance of NOTA vote share and ranks in the two states:

1. Expensive Star Campaigns (Gujarat): A large section of voters are influenced by huge, expensive and star campaigns which divert their attention from other (independent and small party) candidates. However, some voters with previous experience know that in reality negligible change is made out of campaign promises. As a result, they voted NOTA rejecting all the candidates. 
2. Reliable Candidates (Himachal Pradesh): Gujarat, which is a state of major importance in Indian politics had less number of reliable candidates than a small state like Himachal Pradesh (proved by the rank and share of NOTA votes in Gujarat in comparison to Himachal Pradesh).

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