The turnout was lower than 69.4% in 2019 in 81 of these 88 seats.The 2019 figure does not include the delimited five seats in Assam and the lone J&K seat that went to polls on Friday as well as the Outer Manipur seat where voting occurred in 15 assembly segments in the first phase.
The overall voter turnout gets revised a day after the polling and EC sources said the figure of 64.7% (at 11 pm Friday) may go up as numbers get updated.
As per EC’s voter turnout app, Tripura accounted for maximum turnout at 79.5% while Uttar Pradesh recorded the lowest at 54.9%. Manipur recorded the second highest turnout at 78%.
The turnout was lower than 2019 in most of the states, with Kerala (all 20 seats) recording the highest drop – by 11.6 percentage points — from 77.8% in 2019 to 66.2% this time. Polling dropped by 9 percentage points in the six Madhya Pradesh seats that went to polls in the second phase while it was 8.9 and 7.4 percentage points lower than 2019 in West Bengal (three seats) and Uttar Pradesh (eight seats), respectively. The five seats of Bihar recorded the second lowest turnout among the states at 57.1%, against 62.9% recorded in these seats in 2019.
The drop was the lowest — just 0.6% — in Karnataka (14 of the total 28 seats), which recorded 68.4% polling compared to 69% in previous general elections.
“Polling is now complete in 14 states/ UTs in the first two phases,” EC said in a statement, adding that in the second phase, voters from 46 villages in Naxal-affected Bastar and Kanker parliamentary constituencies in Chhattisgarh cast their votes in a polling booth set up in their own village for the first time in a Lok Sabha election.
With the second phase voting coming to an end, polling in the seven-phase general elections has been completed in 189 of total 543 Lok Sabha seats so far.
Polling on Friday started at 7am and ended at 6pm. The scorching sun in several constituencies where temperatures soared to over 40 degrees Celsius kept several voters indoors.
Among those whose fate was sealed on Friday are Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and Shashi Tharoor, Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, actor-turned-politician Arun Govil and former Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy. Among those who are eyeing a hat-trick in their respective seats are Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla, Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and actor-turned politician Hema Malini.