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 the 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.
He is also the director of Centre for Knowledge Alternatives, which documents district-level statistics and cultures of India. He studied law and economics for his masters and doctorate. In addition to psephology, he has written on issues related to law and development.
informal markets and knowledge production. He is passionate about education: recently, he co-founded a school in rural western UP.
Arun Kumar Kaushik teaches economics at O.P. Jindal Global University. He is an economist by training and has earned degrees in business economics, law and economics, and development economics. He has authored several papers on electoral politics of India. His other research interests are intellectual property law and its dynamics and distortions. He is most passionate about teaching and especially enjoys quantitative subjects.
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