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The Election Commission will hold a press conference today, Saturday, March 16, at 3 pm to announce the schedule for the General Elections of 2024 as well as the dates of various state assemblies. It will be broadcast live on the ECI's social media channels.
The largest democratic exercise in history is expected to take place over the course of multiple phases over the course of a month. The Election Commission of India (ECI) will release the schedule for the Lok Sabha polls and assembly elections in select states on Saturday, the poll monitor announced on Friday. Election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Gyanesh Kumar were accompanied by Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Friday.
The 17th Lok Sabha's tenure expires on June 16, and a new House must be created before to that date. June marks the end of the assembly' terms in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Odisha. The news was made one day after the President named retired bureaucrats Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu as election commissioners.
This was the first time election commissioners had been chosen under a contentious new law, and it followed a meeting of a high-level selection committee led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will consider the case against this law and declined to postpone the appointments.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi may become the first person since Jawaharlal Nehru to win three national mandates in a row in the 18th Lok Sabha elections. He will be up against a coalition of opposition parties that want to weaken the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) powerful rainbow Hindu coalition.
While highlighting the accomplishments of his administration over the past ten years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked for input from the public on how to shape the Union government's "Viksit Bharat" (developed India) agenda on Friday. The prime minister expressed his eagerness to hear the opinions, recommendations, and support of the public in a letter written the night before the general elections were announced. He went on to say that achieving the goal of creating a Viksit Bharat requires cooperation.
The previous Lok Sabha elections took place in seven phases starting on April 11 and were declared on March 10, 2019. May 23 was election day.
With over 1.2 million polling places and approximately 970 million eligible voters, this election is the biggest democratic process in history. In addition to surpassing the population of all of Europe, the number of eligible voters is about four times that of voters in the next-largest democracy, the United States.
Sandeep Dikshit, the leader of the Congress, stated that the party was ready for the polls. He expressed that everything is well-prepared. Rahul ji's Bharat Jodo Yatra served as the catalyst for their public awareness campaign on pertinent subjects.
The Congress received 52 seats and the BJP won 303 seats in 2019. Modi has targeted 370 seats for the BJP and 400 seats for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) this time around. With 67% of the vote, this was the most turnout for a Lok Sabha election since the first one in 1951–1952. For the first time, the percentage of women participating exceeded that of men (67.18% to 67.01%).
Before the elections, the BJP made a concerted effort to win over allies, and it will now attempt to protect its stronghold in northern India while expanding its influence in eastern and southern regions of the country. Countering Modi's popularity and the party's potent blend of polarisation, welfare politics, and development would be a struggle for the opposition's Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Making the contests as local as possible is the goal of the opposition coalition.
The poll authority claimed last month that 26.3 million new voters had been added to the electoral lists. Of these, 14.1 million were women, outnumbering the 12.2 million newly enrolled male voters by 15%.
A little over 48,000 people identified as "third gender" voters cast ballots in 2014, up from 39,680 in 2014. In addition, almost 20 million young voters in the 18–19 and 20–29 age groups were added to the electoral rolls at the same time. There were at least 18.5 million voters who were over 80, and there were 238,000 centenarians—those who are 100 years of age or older.
With 153 million voters as of February 8, Uttar Pradesh had the highest voter population. There are 57,000 registered voters in Lakshadweep.
India held its first elections after gaining independence in 1951, but the months-long process continued into 1952 as the Election Commission of India (ECI) found it difficult to reach remote areas in a nation where the vast majority of voters were illiterate at the time. Just 45% of voters participated.
ECI came up with the idea of using election insignia for parties prominently and using elephants to move ballot boxes over rough terrain in order to facilitate universal adult franchise, as required by the Constitution. Since then, major democracies have adopted the independent poll panel as a model.
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