The brouhaha over the final voter turnout in the Delhi Assembly polls was the main story on the evening news on Sunday. The Election Commission released its final voter turnout figure of 62.59 per cent on Sunday evening amid questions from the Aam Aadmi Party over the delay in putting out these numbers.
The political questions notwithstanding, the figures indicate a jump of over 20 per cent in voter numbers from the provisional turnout figure at 4pm on voting day, February 8.According to the Election Commission's draft notification for the Delhi polls, the national capital has a total of 1,47,03,692 voters. For the numerically challenged, that is 1.47 crore voters.
Going by the provisional figure of voters at 4pm, a total of about 62,18,191 people had voted by then. The figure of voters by close of polls, going by the Election Commission's final figure, is 92,03,040. That would mean about 29,84,849 people, nearly 30 lakh voters, voted in about two hours till 6pm, the scheduled close of polls.
Interestingly, in many places, polls did not close at 6pm. Ranbir Singh, Delhi's chief electoral officer, told The Times of India on Sunday that voting continued till up to 8pm in many booths, where voters present at a booth before close of polls were allowed to cast their votes.
The massive jump in numbers is perhaps one reason why some BJP leaders were confident about the saffron party's chances despite exit polls suggesting a washout victory for the Aam Aadmi Party. Most exit polls released on Saturday predicted the Aam Aadmi Party winning at least 45 of the 70 seats. As has been the practice, data for the exit polls is collected hours before the end of voting.
BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi told mediapersons on Saturday that “exit polls are not exact polls”. Lekhi told ANI, exit polls were typically “based till 4 or 5pm after which 11 to 15 per cent votes have been polled. So we think that our voter comes out of home after lunch. So these exit polls do not include that 11-15 per cent votes".
To buttress her arguments, Lekhi gave the example of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, saying exit polls gave just 220 seats to the NDA, "whereas the BJP alone won 303 seats".
B.L. Santhosh, national general secretary of the BJP, on Sunday triggered debate on social media with a cryptic post, citing the jump in polling numbers in the late hours.
Santhosh tweeted, "3 factors about #DelhiPolls2020 that doesn’t add up ...
• 17% vote in last 2 hours
• @AamAadmiParty narrative about EVM disturbance
• exit poll results . .. Are we missing something here ..? Are some forces anticipating something other than exit polls ...?"
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Manoj Tiwari, BJP MP and the party's Delhi unit chief, declared the exit polls will fail and the saffron party would win 48 of the 70 seats in the Delhi polls. Tiwari, a former Bhojpuri movie star, on Monday even tweeted a video of him batting in a Celebrity Cricket League match. Tiwari hit 70 off 40 balls in that innings, with the score perhaps being symbolic of the BJP's hopes.
So, did the BJP marshal its loyal voters to come out en masse after lunch on voting day? And if so, would such mobilisation be enough to dethrone Arvind Kejriwal and AAP? We will know in less than 24 hours!