Who Moved My Vote? Digging Through Indian Electoral Data

Nothing is so emblematic of the idea of democracy as elections. The election machinery is meant to draw power from the people and pump it into our representatives. But what if the machine is not foolproof? And what if that is by design? What if the electoral methods we employ leak our mandates and divert power to someone else?

Electoral results are ultimately only numbers. Surely they can be added, subtracted and manipulated to achieve a desired result? In fact, this happens routinely in India's first-past-the-post system. Parties with fewer votes may secure power. and the 'quality' of victory may not always correspond to the number of seats they have won. So, numbers also tell us the 'real' rise and decline of parties in elections. They help us measure how competitive or disproportionate elections are in India. 

In Who Moved My Vote?, Yugank Goyal and Arun Kumar Kaushik dig through the data from India's national and state election results to demonstrate how the system creates leakages in the mandates it returns, and why the whole apparatus needs radical reform.