On Saturday, 25th May, leftist propaganda website ‘The Wire’ published a report with dubious voter turnout data for 2024 Lok Sabha elections. In the report, they are claiming that 19.4 crore fewer voters cast their votes in the first five phases of Lok Sabha Elections 2024 compared to the 2019 General Elections. According to The Wire, 70.1 crore votes were polled in 2019 across 426 seats, while in 2024 only 50.7 crore votes were polled.
Interestingly, just over 61 crore votes were polled in total in 2019 Lok Sabha elections, but leftist propaganda website ‘The Wire’ concluded that over 70 crore votes were polled in the seats that went for elections in first 5 phases in 2024, implying there was negative turnout in remaining seats. How negative turnout is possible, only the great scientists at ‘The Wire’ can explain to us..
To support their claim, The Wire used five press releases by the Election Commission of India from 2019 and the latest absolute number of data released by the agency. However, they made a big blunder in calculating the numbers as they used total electorate of 2019 and not total votes. Archived links of The Wire’s report can be seen here and here.
Extreme fake news by Wire
— Abhishek (@AbhishBanerj) May 26, 2024
They claim 19.4 cr less votes cast in first 5 phases than 2019!
They say 70 cr votes in first 5 phases in 2019, which dropped to 50 cr in 2024!
Lol… in entire 2019 election, there were only 61 cr votes!
Please delete immediately & apologize pic.twitter.com/hOLM6FBiTh
The Press Releases linked by The Wire for phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, phase 4 and phase 5 can be accessed here. The latest data released by EC can be checked here. The press release of the first phase used by The Wire is from 10th April while Polling date was 11th April. Similarly, phase 2 press release was from 16th April and the polling date was 18th April. The press release for phase 3 was from 22nd April and the polling date was 23rd April. Press release for phase 4 was from 26th April and the polling date was 29th April. The press release for the fifth phase was from 3rd May and the polling date was 6th May. Polling schedule for 2019 Elections can be seen here.
Notably, in the header of all five press releases, the date of press release and date of polling were clearly mentioned.
Now if we check the press releases from 2019, they were released before the polling dates, and not after. These press releases only had the number of total electorates from the said constituencies and not the votes polled in those phases.
OpIndia analysed all 427 constituencies and compared the data from the actual Election Commission data that can be checked here.
As per the data, there were 71,14,40,983 total voters in 2019 in the constituencies that went to poll in the first five phases of 2024, out of which 48,47,07,015 exercised their right to vote. That means 68.13% voting. In 2024, there were 76,40,80,337 registered voters out of which 50,72,97,288 voters exercised their right to vote. That makes 66.39% voting. It is evident that though the voting percentage reduced by 1.74%, the total number of voters who cast votes increased by 2,25,90,273 (2 crore, 25 lakh, 90 thousand and 273). Please note that we compared the voter turnout data of constituencies where the polling has been done and not the constituencies that were in the first five phases of 2019. Furthermore, the names of constituencies of Assam are different from 2019 due to delimitation exercise that took place in 2023.
OpIndia’s data analysis of that can be checked here.
