Gujarat has registered the second highest None of The Above (NOTA) votes of 1.8% in the State and Union Territory assembly elections since 2015, while Bihar tops the list with 2.48% votes.
For the 243 seats in Bihar, a total of 3,450 candidates were in the fray for the elections in October-November 2015. More than 3.79 crore voters exercised their franchise. Of the total voters, 2.48% had refused to pick any of the candidates, instead opting for the NOTA button.
More than 5.5 lakh voters chose not to vote for any candidate in Gujarat and instead went for NOTA, impacting the results in several constituencies across the State.
In Puducherry, during the 2016 elections, 1.67% of the over 8 lakh voters opted for NOTA.
West Bengal stands fifth in the list with 1.53% of the 5.4 crore electors having exercised the same option in 2016.
The Tamil Nadu Assembly elections recorded 1.30% NOTA votes last year.
While in Goa, where 291 candidates were contesting the elections for 40 seats earlier this year, 1.19% of the over 9 lakh voters expressed their dislike for all the candidates in their respective constituencies.
Assam fell a little behind with 1.12% of about 1.7 crore voters not opting for any candidate last year.
While Uttarakhand recorded 1.01% NOTA votes in February.
Lowest numbers
The lowest of 0.40% NOTA was recorded in the Delhi Assembly elections in 2015 when a total of 1.33 electors cast their votes.
In Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP swept the elections, only 0.87% voters — who turned up at polling stations — rejected all the candidates. Again, the 2017 Assembly elections in Punjab recorded 0.70%; Manipur earlier this year registered 0.55%; and Kerala Assembly polls in 2016 had 0.53% NOTA votes.
Evaluating the NOTA effect
The None of the Above (NOTA) option polled 1.8% of the total votes in Gujarat. In a largely bipolar election, this did have an effect, but not as substantive as a preliminary look would indicate.
NOTA on a high: In 115 - nearly two-thirds of the 182 seats, the NOTA option was ranked third, a high number.
Did NOTA matter? In 30 seats, the votes polled on NOTA were greater than the difference of votes polled by the winner and the runner-up. The BJP won 15 of those seats, the Congress won 13 and Independents won 2. Arguably, NOTA was a factor in determining the victor in these seats.
Assessing the effect: It is not enough for NOTA to be greater than the win margin, for the NOTA votes could have been polled by the victor, runner-up or any other candidate. We need to evaluate if the NOTA vote share was substantive and affected the contest. We use the Laakso-Taageparamethod (http://bit.ly/effparties) of calculating effective number of parties for each seat (Eff) and find out this figure by taking out the NOTA votes (EffN). The number of seats with the largest values of Eff minus EffN and where NOTA was higher than the win margin was only 17 (BJP winning 5, Congress 10, Independents 2). These are the seats where NOTA was more likely to be effective.
