Data | Andheri East: Not a NOTA notable, just a blip amid falling vote shares

NOTA continues to be salient in Naxalite areas, but its share has fallen in recent elections

The bypoll results of the election to Andheri East in Maharashtra, announced last Sunday, were a mere formality. With the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate, Murji Patel, withdrawing from the contest, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) candidate, Rutuja Ramesh Latke, won the election comfortably. The other six candidates – four of them independent — fetched less than 2% of the votes each.

The election result is now part of the record books as 12,806 voters (14.79%) chose the None Of The Above (NOTA) option. The Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction accused the BJP of influencing voters to choose the NOTA option, which garnered the second highest vote share.

Following a Supreme Court directive, NOTA was first used during the 2013 Assembly elections in four States — Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh — and Delhi. While the number of voters selecting NOTA was high in the elections held soon after the court directive, the number considerably declined in later polls.

The latest Assembly elections in every State show that the share of NOTA votes has been relatively high in areas affected by Left-Wing Extremism (LWE). Map 1 shows the vote percentage secured by NOTA in the latest Assembly election. In 13 Assembly seats, the NOTA vote share crossed the 5% mark. Four of them in Chhattisgarh — Bijapur, Narayanpur, Chitrakot and Dantewada; two in Andhra Pradesh — Araku Valley and Paderum; and Lakshmipur in Odisha were located in districts most affected by LWE.

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Map 2 depicts the 30 districts most affected by LWE, according to the Home Ministry’s reply in the Lok Sabha in March 2021. Four districts — Dantewada, Bastar, Visakhapatnam and Koraput — are part of this list and host the seven seats mentioned in Map 1.

Map 3 depicts the NOTA vote share in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. In 21 Lok Sabha seats, the NOTA share crossed the 5% mark. Two of the seats were in the Kanker and Bastar districts of Chhattisgarh, one in Koraput in Odisha, one each in the Khunti and West Singhbhum districts of Jharkhand, and multiple in the Jamui and Gaya districts of Bihar, which feature in the Home Ministry’s list of districts most affected by LWE.