What’s in a name?
NEW DELHI: Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) to be used in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections will carry a candidate’s photograph along with his/her party’s symbol, chief election commissioner Sunil Arora said at a press conference while announcing the schedule on March 10 for this summers’ general elections.
“This will help avoid any confusion, which may arise when candidates with same or similar names contest from the same constituency,” he said. Political parties and candidates are concerned that these namesake candidates may cut into their vote share by confusing the voters. How big is the problem in India? An HT analysis suggests that while it may not be widespread, it is not insignificant either.
HT has looked at Lok Sabha and state assembly constituencies where at least two candidates had the same name. Only the elections held since 2014 have been analysed here. Several computerised algorithms such as N-gram Fingerprint have been used to identify candidates with the same name but different spellings.
There were at least 23 constituencies in 2014 Lok Sabha elections where at least two candidates shared the same full name. In the state assembly elections held since 2014, there were at least 108 such constituencies across 19 states. Among them, there were two Lok Sabha and eight assembly constituencies with more than one group of candidates with the same name. To be sure, these may be underestimated figures considering a small margin of error in identifying multiple candidates with same name but different spellings. Tamil Nadu had the highest number of constitu- encies with multiple namesake candidates contesting the same seat, both in Lok Sabha and assembly polls. It was followed by Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The concern among the front-running candidates that their namesakes may cut into their vote share may be genuine.
The data shows that in 74 Lok Sabha and assembly constituencies, at least one of the top three contestants in terms of the vote share had to contest against at least one candidate of the same name.
However, none of these frontrunners lost because of their namesakes cutting into their votes. They either won the seat or lost with a margin greater than the combined vote share of their namesake candidates. This means that even if the voters would have voted for them instead of their namesake candidates, they would still have lost.
To be sure, this doesn’t mean the namesake candidates cannot play a significant role. For instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Chandu Lal Sahu contested Chhattisgarh’s Mahasamund Lok Sabha seat in 2014 against Congress’s Ajit Jogi. But there were seven other independent candidates named Chandu Lal Sahu in fray. Even as Sahu won the seat with a margin of 0.1% votes, the seat could easily have gone to the Congress had