Vote in the Lok Sabha elections, but know it’s just a symbolic gesture. Voice matters more

To have a real impact in the current system, you are better off holding the government to account through means that fall under the umbrella of free speech in a democracy.

Representational image of voters at a polling station | PTI Photo/Santosh Hirlekar

Voting is a duty. A sacred right. A privilege. And many other virtuous things, if one were to recount lessons from civics textbooks, patriotic movies, politicians’ speeches, newspaper editorials, and various other sources of popular culture. But the real question to ask, beyond all the pious lectures on civic duty, is, what’s the quantifiable impact of our one vote on elections? More importantly, how does it get translated into policy? And is the emotional significance attached to voting worth the hype?

If we calculate the probability of your individual vote deciding the national election outcome, it comes to practically zero (or e^-600, which is much, much less than 1 in a billion) in a normal race.

In an extremely close race at the constituency level, your vote has a greater chance of deciding the winner, but the probability is still quite low. For instance, take a median-sized constituency like Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. Assuming that there was a neck-to-neck race between two parties here, the probability of your vote deciding the outcome comes to around 1/1,337.** This, we can imagine, is your vote’s impact. These are odds that, in any other sphere of life, you’d dismiss as not worth making any effort for.

 

Weakened MPs, weakened voters

The story of your powerlessness as a voter does not stop here. After all, electing representatives is not an end in itself—it’s to ensure that the will of the people is reflected in how they are governed. Representatives are merely a means toward that end.

These elected representatives, if their party gets a majority in Parliament, form a government. In a multiparty system, coalition governments may also be cobbled together by parties that don’t agree on everything. These parties ally to form a government to implement what they don’t disagree on. There are at least three layers of transmission in this democratic process—people choose their representatives, representatives form a government (likely a coalition of sorts), and finally, the government enacts policies with the consent of Parliament.

However, a couple of additional constraints placed on elected MPs render them utterly ineffective as representatives of their constituency: the party whip and the anti-defection law.

Individual MPs in India are bound by law to vote along party lines in Parliament. The only way they can vote otherwise is by formally defecting from their party, which comes with yet another hurdle. To avoid being disqualified, one-third of all elected members belonging to that party must join them. This abstraction of power away from the elected MP to the party leadership corrupts the original democratic choice. In essence, even if there’s magically perfect alignment between an elected representative and their electorate, the representative may still be unable to vote as their constituents want them to. They can only vote the way their party tells them to.

This is one of the reasons why the BJP, for instance, finds it hard to win in southern India. It’s not like BJP MPs from, say, Karnataka, can vote in Parliament in the interests of their state when their party whip tells them to vote otherwise. And the BJP, by virtue of having its base in the Hindi heartland, is unlikely to pick Karnataka over, say, Uttar Pradesh, in what’s a zero-sum game of policymaking. It’s true for all national parties; as they get stronger, their internal contradictions get more difficult to manage.

Parliament’s voting mechanisms can be seen as a system of unfairness that mirrors the flaws of the broader electoral system. And it is used hundreds of times in a given term, amplifying those flaws each time. The average MP casts about 50 votes in Parliament in one year. Each time they do so, in accordance with their party boss’ rather than constituents’ wishes, a voter’s value in the democracy erodes even further. It’s reasonable to assume that voters basically have 0 impact on policymaking in this scenario.

 

Voice still matters

So, what’s the alternative? One important way to achieve better voter representation in policy within the current system is to move as much of actual policymaking to the state assemblies and governments as possible. Even better, to local governments. These are smaller constituencies and legislative bodies, and will therefore have slightly better transmission efficiency. Another more important way is to consider direct democracy efforts—such as ballot measures—in controlled and localised settings.

Do vote in this general election. But remember, your vote is more symbolic than anything else. To have a real impact in the current system, you are better off holding the government to account through protests, organising, activism, writing, policy recommendations, policy analysis, and other means that fall under the umbrella of free speech in a democracy. So, maybe, start by raising your voice to protect the space for dissent because that is a necessary condition for all the others to follow.

** As an example, imagine you’re a voter in the Azamgarh Lok Sabha constituency in Uttar Pradesh. Let’s assume, for ease of calculation, that it is a two-party contest between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, there were approximately 17.7 lakh electors in Azamgarh. We’ll maintain this number as constant, again, for ease of calculation. 

Assume the elections are very close. One way to estimate the probability of a single vote affecting the outcome is to assume an odd number of electors, N. And in the N-1 votes that have been counted so far, we have a tie. Thus, your vote will break this tie and decide the elections.

Now, let’s assume the probability of a voter choosing BJP is p and for SP it is q. Given our assumptions, both parties would have the same number of votes (N/2) for there to be a tie before you voted to decide the election. However, in this scenario, p and q will not be exactly equal (0.5) but slightly off that. Thus, the total number of votes received by the BJP, say, must differ from its expectation of N/2 by |p-0.5|N. This situation is commonly modelled as a binomial distribution. 

It’s useful to approximate the above binomial distribution as a normal distribution with standard deviation of √(Npq). If we assume p=0.45 and q=0.55, for the BJP to win, Azamgarh needs the result to be 10 standard deviations off the mean. With N = 17.7 lakh, the probability of one vote impacting the result comes to an absurdly low number— practically 0. Instead, if we assume p = 0.5, or the race is extremely close as we have, the probability of impact of that one vote reduces to 1/√N, which for Azamgarh comes to 1/1337.

Nilakantan RS is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India’s Great Divide. He tweets @puram_politics. Views are personal.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)