As electioneering in the 2014 general elections went digital combining social media and Big Data, several interesting trivia came to light.
The Big Data mined and analysed by city-based Modak Analytics generated several insights to be used effectively by political parties in campaigning.
The company, engaged by a political party to understand the demography of 81.4 crore voters in India, registered by the Election Commission, rolled out colossal amount of electoral and other data and collated it into information to create campaign and booth strategies.
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Previously, strategies were created at macro level i.e., Assembly-level information to gauge the caste, religion and socio-economic equations. This time it was a systematic effort to collate and refine voter records.
The exercise involved was massive. Nine lakh PDF documents amounting to 2.5 crore PDF pages decoded from 12 languages had to be looked into and information deciphered for 81.4 crore voters, says Milind Chitgupakar, data scientist and chief analytics officer and Aarti Joshi, co-founder and executive vice-president of Modak Analytics.
The first insight from the electoral data in 2013 was ‘missing youth voters’ in Andhra Pradesh. The political party decided to target young voters and it resulted in a massive increase in registration of young voters for the 2014 elections thanks to a massive outreach campaign, they claim.
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In India, almost 70 per cent of newly-registered voters are under 35 years of age and nine per cent of the total electorate enrolled in the last eight to 10 months.
Election Trivia
Around 1.2 crore voters in UP have ‘Ram’ in their name and around 40 lakh have ‘Mohammed’ in their name. UP has 13.4 crore voters.
In A.P., 64 voters are aged ‘0’, according to ECI
In A.P. 13.65 lakh men have Venkata as their first name and 19.28 lakh women have Lakshmi in some part of their name.
The largest constituency for Lok Sabha 2014 is Malkajgiri, A.P. with 29 lakh voters, smallest is Lakshadweep with 48,000 voters. LB Nagar in Andhra Pradesh is the largest Assembly constituency with 5.3 lakh voters.
Most glamorous Assembly constituency is 177 Bandra (W) with celebrities like Amir Khan, Shahrukh Khyan, Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Rishi Kapoor, Neetu Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor.
Aatka village of Jharkhand has 242 voters who ECI has listed as over 100 years old.
In Chhattisgarh, there are nine voters aged 90 to 100 years under the same house number.
There are some glitches too in the electoral roll data. For instance in J&K , voter Khem Raj’s age is recorded as 27,567 years. (Raipur Domana Assembly, booth No. 24M)