Notes from the Election
Voter Apathy, People should vote where they live, BRS, Jagan and the Price of a vote
Voter Apathy
Voter turnout is the ratio of the number of people who voted to the number that were registered to vote. This ratio tends to be lower in cities than in the villages, which people attribute to voter apathy.
But to believe in the voter apathy theory, you must believe that urban voters’ political engagement is at that sweet spot where they are apathetic enough to bring down the numerator, but engaged1 enough to get themselves registered, increasing the denominator.
On May 13, the voter turnout in Hyderabad was below 50%. If you are in Hyderabad, Bangalore or any of the major cities, look around you and check among your relatives, neighbours and colleagues. Did half of them fail to vote? This test shouldn't be difficult to perform. Asking “Did you vote?” and getting an inked left index finger shown in response is a perfectly normal small talk conversation topic the day after the election. My own test tells me that most among my acquaintances try their best to vote, rearranging their schedules to be able to do so where it is reasonably possible. While I know of a couple of people who did not vote, most did2.
Anecdotes are not data, but here, that dictum strengthens my case. The charge of urban voter apathy is directed at people like us, the middle and upper middle classes. If you are reading this, you are probably among the top 5-10% of the population. For the PLU to be the cause of low voter turnout, our turnout should be close to 0. That is definitely not the case. The charge of voter apathy is one of those things that seems persuasive at first glance but breaks down the moment you give it some thought.
I think that the most straightforward and correct explanation is that cities have a higher proportion of duplicate voters because the population is more mobile. For example, I and my wife have been assigned different polling stations to vote in. That is because when we moved to this apartment 6 years back, I changed my voter registration. Then we realised that the new polling booth is in fact less convenient to us than the old one. So we didn't bother to change my wife's registration, deciding that if ever the Election Commission finds that she no longer lives at the old address and deletes her name from the rolls, we could always register again.
Yes, the form for changing the registration is different from the one for new registration. When I updated my voter registration, I took care to use the right form. But I don't think that most people are that careful, especially when they register in one of those drives that the EC conducts, so I am sure that there are many more duplicate voters in the cities than in the villages.
I find it curious that there are so many people willing to glibly comment about voter apathy, but there doesn't seem to be a single survey about it. The task should be simple enough. Do a survey the day after the election. Pick up the electoral roll, try to contact a random sample of people. To those you are able to contact, ask if they have voted. If they haven't, ask them for the reasons. Try to find out the reasons for why the untraceable cannot be reached. In fact, the last part can be done along with the current opinion polls. I am assuming that they start their sampling from the electoral rolls even now. They can report what proportion of their sample is unreachable and the reasons for the same. If this proportion is higher in urban areas, it proves the hypothesis.
People should vote where they live
The actual measure of voter apathy, as I mentioned earlier, is the number of residents of a city who aren't registered to vote there. This won't show up in the voter turnout number. But even this is unlikely to be a case of apathy in general. Many residents of cities retain their registration at their home towns even though they haven’t lived there for years, perhaps even decades. They go back to vote. I know many colleagues who waited for the election dates to be announced so that they could plan their annual vacation. They wanted to be in their home towns in Andhra on voting day. The media believes that commitment of this kind is something to be celebrated, but I disagree.
We are due for a delimitation after the next census. On this issue, the focus has been on the impacts across states, but delimitation within states also hasn't happened since the 2001 census. Many cities have grown drastically in the past two decades and are therefore underrepresented. The next delimitation should rectify this imbalance and bring with it an opportunity to focus on urban issues. But this will happen only if urban voters take interest in the politics of the city they live in. We should encourage everyone to vote where they live. I am calling for an end to the admiring tone used when the phenomenon of people traveling back to their home towns to vote is described.
BRS’s implosion
I wonder if delimitation had taken place within Telangana, the BRS could have won last year’s assembly elections. It won almost all the seats in Hyderabad and the surrounding regions and lost most of the seats in the rural areas. For a party that lost so narrowly, its implosion in the past 6 months has been spectacular. It is a good illustration of the first corollary of Vali’s Boon
The first corollary of Vali’s boon is that parties in first and second place can punch above their weight for many election cycles. A party may be getting structurally weaker. Its organization may be suffering atrophy and voters may be getting increasingly dissatisfied with it, but as long as it stays at or above second place, it can come back to power. Now, power is an aphrodisiac that can hide the fact you can’t get it up on your own. So a party that is in power can hide many of its weaknesses till they overwhelm it and push it to third place. The optimistic way of looking at it is that as long as you are in the second place, you get a chance to work on your structural weakness.
Jagan
Of course, it is possible that some people are registered to vote both in the city and in their home town. One of my colleagues falls into that category. In November, he voted in Telangana’s assembly elections, but went to his hometown in Andhra to vote in the General and Andhra state elections on May 13. He is one of the reasons for Hyderabad’s low turnout.
He, like many others of my acquaintance, were animated by a desire to somehow vote out Jagan, who seems to be despised by every educated person in Andhra and is believed to be leading the state to ruin3.
It was fun to be an outsider in Hyderabad in 2014. You got to hear nasty things from people on both sides of the divide about the other side when they were out of earshot. Based on what the people of Andhra told me, the people of Telangana were lazy, given to drink and to living on handouts. If you had asked me to foretell the future of the two states, I would have picked Telangana as the one most likely to go to seed by 2024. Instead, it is Andhra Pradesh that went and elected someone like Jagan in 2019, and going by the anguished predictions of my colleagues, may well have done it again this year.
The price of a vote
Andhra does seem to be ahead on one parameter. Apparently, voters are getting ₹2,000-₹3,000 per vote in that state, as against a measly 500 in Telangana. This year, the TDP has paid 2000 per vote, plus a voucher for an electric cooker, redeemable only if they win. According to the calculations that were explained to me, an assembly constituency has around 2 lakh voters, half of whom have to be paid. This means 20 crore per constituency. This year, simultaneous elections are taking place, which means that the MP candidate’s share is 5 crore per assembly constituency and the MLA candidate has to shell out the rest4.
One might have hoped that only the poorest expect cash for their votes. Apparently that is not the case. Even middle class voters take the money, rationalising their choice saying that if they don't, the middlemen, that is the party workers will swallow the payment, so they might as well take it - at least it will pay for one month 's AC bill.
Of course, the money does not influence their vote unless they get too little of it, in which case they feel insulted and vote for the other party. In general though, all parties give equal amounts and the voters take the money and vote for the party and candidate of their choice. This is a win for the voters. The only bad thing about this is that the parties have to somehow accumulate that much money to fight elections. Luckily, the Supreme Court has held Electoral Bonds to be illegal, otherwise the money would have been collected through corrupt means.
P. S.
I believe that there should be a platform for short-form notes, or what used to be called micro-blogging. I wrote a note on Substack Notes about this, but apparently no one reads Notes (or at least my notes) that much. What do you think? Is there a need for such a platform?
The opposite of “apathetic” is not, as it turns out, “pathetic”, but engaged
In November’s assembly elections, I and my wife were among the non-voters. That morning, we went cycling on the excellent cycling track built parallel to the Outer Ring Road. Unfortunately, I fainted from tiredness while on the bicycle. Although I recovered quite quickly, I slept off from the exhaustion and by the time I woke up, it was too late to vote. The infrastructure development done by the BRS government cost it a couple of votes. To ensure that this won’t be repeated, on May 13, I cycled to the polling booth.
His government is essentially the model that the INDIA alliance will want to emulate. He buys votes through welfare handouts and his rent-seeking has destroyed the business environment in the state. One measure that particularly annoys my Telugu colleagues is that the government has taken over the alcohol industry in the state, replacing all liquor brands with knock-off ones with similar sounding names. The government-run alcohol shops accept only cash, not even UPI. I wonder why. He is a Christian who has solid support from the “converts”. Like any good Fascist, he shuts down dissent through strong-arm tactics. A story is told of a businesswoman in the state who tweeted the mildest criticism of the government. The government shut down her restaurant business. You would expect that this would make him a target of the right wing, but fortunately for him, the TDP is not considered a reliable partner of the BJP, so who knows when they’ll be called upon to switch sides. The left-liberals, of course have their hands full fighting Fascists at the Union Government level. Staying in Hyderabad, the only way he affects my life is that he regularly takes out garish front-page ads in the Hindu, which, it must be pointed out, has no impact on its editorial independence.
Suggested title of paper: Distributional impacts of One Nation One Election: A Case Study from Andhra Pradesh
Good insights!
I’m just hoping that the liquor lobby in Karnataka is strong enough (and I have reason to believe it is) that they don’t nationalise liquor here as well!
Also if the policies are alike why didn’t india incorporate Jagan ?