Election FAQs

All Your Questions Answered

The 2024 assembly elections for Maharashtra will be held on November 20 while the Jharkhand assembly elections will be held in two phases - November 13 and 20. The results for both states will be announced on November 23.

Elections will be held in 288 seats in Maharashtra and 81 seats in Jharkhand. 

Maharashtra will see a direct battle between the two alliances - Mahayuti and the Maha Vikas Aghadi - that appeared after a string of political churnings in the state over the last five years. The BJP, Congress, NCP factions led by Sharad Pawar and his nephew Ajit Pawar, and both Shiv Sena groups led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and his predecessor Uddhav Thackeray are the major players. 

In Jharkhand, Chief Minister Hemant Soren's Jharkhand Mukti Morcha will see a strong challenge from his former aide Champai Soren, who was given the top post when the former was jailed. 

The model code of conduct is a set of guidelines that candidates, and political parties and governments must follow to keep elections fair. These generally include restrictions on government announcements and freebies that can influence voters.

The model code of conduct comes into effect as soon as the Election Commission announces poll dates.

You can contact the nearest Election Commission office or visit the National Voters' Services Portal at www.nvsp.in.

Even if you don't have an election ID card, you can still vote with most government-issued photo identity documents. These include:

If don't have these, you can register both offline and online for a voter ID card.

To register offline, you have to visit the state election office and request a Form 6. After filling in the necessary details and providing all relevant documents, you can submit the form to be issued the election ID at a later date.

You can also register online by visiting the National Voters' Services Portal at www.nvsp.in.

Yes. As long as you have your name in the voters' list, you can walk in to a polling booth and cast your vote with an Aadhaar card as ID proof.

Only if you work for the military, the government or are on election duty and are posted outside your state; or you have been taken into custody as "preventive detention".

Yes, as long as they have not acquired citizenship of any other country and are otherwise eligible to be registered as a voter at their place of residence in India.

EVMs were first used in 1982 in 50 polling stations in a by-election to Kerala's Parur assembly seat. The first large scale use of EVMs was in 1998 when it was used in 16 assembly seats in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi. The 2004 Lok Sabha election was the first parliamentary poll conducted entirely on EVMs.

EVMs sped up the process of vote-counting by more than 10 times in some cases. While the counting of ballot papers took between 30 to 40 hours in each assembly constituency, these days results or trends emerge within two to three hours.

The Election Commission says EVMs are tamper-proof and accurate.

Questions have been raised over EVMs in the past few years, mostly from parties that have lost the polls (the same parties have often swallowed the questions when they won elections).
 
To set questions and doubts at rest, the Election Commission organised a "hackathon" last year, but the allegations of voting machines being manipulated persist.

But given the sheer scale of Indian elections and the size of the electorate, EVMs are unlikely to be discarded. Experts say they are certainly much less "hackable" than ballot boxes which have been known to be stolen, switched or destroyed.

An EVM or Electronic Voting Machine is an electronic device for recording votes. It consists of two units - a control unit and a balloting unit.

Since 2010, the Election Commission has been phasing in a third unit called the VVPAT or the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, which allows voters to verify that their votes have been recorded correctly by printing a paper receipt. This system will be used with all voting machines in the upcoming assembly and general elections.

NOTA or "None Of The Above" is a voting option on EVMs that allows voters to reject every candidate in their constituency. It was introduced In October 2013 following a Supreme Court order.

According to the Election Commission, even if the number of voters choosing NOTA is higher than the number of votes polled by any of the candidates, the candidate who has the largest number of votes has to be declared elected.

Yes, a legislator can contest parliamentary elections in India. However, according to the Prohibition of Simultaneous Membership Rules, 1950, they will have to resign from the state legislature within 14 days of the Lok Sabha election results being declared. Therefore, they cannot hold both positions.

Bellwether seats are those that have historically voted for the winner. The sentiment in the run up to the polls and early trends on counting day in these seats often act as some of the surest indications of what the outcome will be.