Economist and current affairs commentator, Parakala Prabhakar, has drawn attention to inexplicable and disconcerting discrepancies in the official turnout figures put out by the Election Commission in Maharashtra which, he says, “question the legitimacy of the mandate”.
Very simply, when polls closed at 5 pm on November 20, the turnout was 58.22%. By 11.30 pm on the same day, after accommodating people presumably waiting in the queue to vote at 5 pm, it increased to 65.02%. Hours before the counting started on November 23, it was put at 66.05%. This means that the turnout increased by 7.83% after polls closed at 5 pm. Parakala estimates that this is, in terms of the number of people, an increase of almost 76 lakhs.
How could such an enormous number have been accommodated in the six hours between polls closing at 5 pm and 11.30 pm on the same day, when the final person waiting in the queue voted?
To illustrate how impossible this actually would be, Parakala cited the following example.
Let’s, for arguments sake, assume there were 1,000 people waiting to vote in a booth when polling stopped at 5 pm. Because they had arrived before 5 pm, they would have the right to vote. If you assume one minute per person to vote – but actually it should be a lot more i.e. closer to 4 or 5 – it would take a 1,000 minutes for these people to vote. A thousand minutes is 16.6 hours. The problem is between 5 pm and 11.30 pm, there are only six and a half hours. So there is no way 1,000 people could have voted in that time. How then could 76 lakhs have done so? This cries out for an explanation from the Election Commission.
