Seats voting in the first phase of the 2025 Bihar Assembly election recorded 60.13 per cent voter turnout (provisional till 5 pm), which is already 4.45 per cent more than the first phase of the 2020 election and 2.84 per cent more than the overall figure from that poll.
The increased voter turnout is all the more significant because the special intensive revision of the state’s voter lists – a contentious exercise the opposition called an attempt to disenfranchise voters from poor and marginalised groups who, they claimed, traditionally vote for them – deleted 47 lakh names.
The reduction in the overall voter base – from 7.89 crore before the exercise to 7.42 crore after – could account for the increased turnout percentage, but only if the actual number of voters is the same.
For example, assume the pre-SIR election saw 60 of 100 people cast their votes for a 60 per cent turnout. Post-SIR, assume the number of eligible voters drops to 80. If the same 60 people vote, then the voter turnout will be 75 per cent. However, if only 40 people vote, the figure drops to 50 per cent.
The SIR impact aside, conventional wisdom suggests high turnouts indicate anti-incumbency, which the opposition is banking on, sweetened by the promise of a government job for every household.
That has been the case over the past three Bihar elections.
In 2010, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal United allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party to score a dominant win; voter turnout was 52.73 per cent and the JDU alone scored 115 seats.
Before the 2015 poll he pivoted, joining up with long-time frenemy Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal instead. Voter turnout was 4.18 per cent more, and the Kumar-Yadav alliance won.
Five years later, Kumar pivoted again, returning to the BJP’s side and his alliance won, again, although the JDU dropped 28 seats from its tally and had to settle for ‘junior partner’ status.
Voter turnout then was 57.29 per cent, .38 per cent higher than the last election.
The first phase of the 2025 election alone is more than that.
And, if true, today’s figures are good news for the opposition and for the Congress and the RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, who will be chief minister if the Mahagathbandhan secures a majority.
But high voter turnouts need not always mean anti-incumbency.
In Chhattisgarh, for example, voter turnout increased by nearly seven per cent between 2008 and 2013, but the Bharatiya Janata Party won both times. The same thing happened in Madhya Pradesh between 2003 and 2013; voter turnout went from 67.25 per cent to 72.07 per cent.
Yet the BJP won all three polls.
Also, the impact of the revision of voter lists, and the deletion of 47 lakh names, needs to be considered.
There is still one more phase of polling to go.
Only 121 of the state’s 243 seats voted today. The other 122 will vote next week, on November 11, and the results will be announced three days after that, on November 14.
Meanwhile, Tejashwi Yadav was among a handful of high-profile names in this phase.
He stood from the family stronghold of Raghopur, which has voted for his father, Lalu, and his mother, Rabri Devi, seven times in the past nine elections. Yadav has held this seat since 2015.
Till 5 pm Raghopur recorded a turnout of 64.01 per cent, 4.32 per cent more than 2020.
Other high-profile seats that voted today were Tarapur, from where Deputy Chief Minister and BJP state unit boss Samrat Choudhary contested. Voter turnout was 58.33 per cent.
Alinagar, where popular folk singer Maithili Thakur is the BJP pick, had 58.05 per cent and Mokama, where drama followed JDU pick Anant Singh’s arrest in a murder case, 62.16 per cent.
The RJD emerged as the single-largest party after the 2020 election with 75 seats, one more than the BJP. The JDU was third with 43 and the Congress, an RJD ally, was fourth with 28.