The post of India’s president is the highest occupied position on the land.
As the tenure of the current President Ram Nath Kovind ends on July 24, the polling for the new Indian President will be held on July 18 and the result will be declared on July 21.
The process of electing the President in India is different from other democracies, say for example the United States.
Before voting begins, the candidates have to file their nominations.
Who can file nominations?
A candidate has to be a citizen of India and must have completed 35 years of age.
He/she must be eligible to be a member of the Lok Sabha.
He/she must not hold "any office of profit under the government of India or the Government of any State or under any local or other authority subject to the control of any of the said Governments".
However, the candidate may be holding the office of president or vice-president or governor of any state or ministers of the union or any state.
Article 54 of the Indian Constitution explains the provisions for the voters who can participate in the election of the President.
It states that the President of India can only be elected by the members of an electoral college, which includes the MPs of both Houses of the Parliament, and the elected members of Legislative Assemblies of all states, including the UTs of Delhi and Puducherry.
Now, the most complex part of the voting or perhaps the entire election process is the calculation of vote value.
Members of Parliament and Members of the Legislative Assembly have different values assigned to them.
On one hand, the value of an MP’s vote is fixed while on the other hand, the value of an MLA’s vote differs according to the state the MLA comes from.
The value of an MP’s vote is calculated by dividing the total value of votes of all the states and UTs by the total number of elected MPs.
Voters from the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha are 543 and 233, respectively, making it 776 voters from Parliament.
Since the total number of votes as per the ECI is 5,43,200 and the number of MPs is 776, the value of a vote for each MP is 700 (5,43,200/776).
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Now, coming to the value of the vote of an MLA.
The MLA’s vote value is dependent on the population of his/her state and the strength of that state’s Legislative Assembly.
To ensure uniformity here, there is a formula that is used to determine the value: the population of the state is divided by 1,000 times the strength of its Legislative Assembly.
For example, if the value of vote of a Karnataka MLA is to be calculated, then it would be 29,299,014 (population of Karnataka) divided (224 i.e. the strength of Karnataka Assembly x 1000), which equals 130.7, rounding it off to 131. Hence, a Karnataka MLA’s vote will have a value of 131.
Counting of votes and winner declaration
The total number of votes of a Presidential candidate is calculated by adding up the value of all the ballots in which the candidate receives a first preference.
The candidate who is declared the winner is not the person who gets the most number of votes, but the person who gets more votes than a certain quota.
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Now, the quota is decided by adding up the votes polled for each candidate, dividing the sum by 2 and adding '1' to the quotient.
The candidate who polls more votes than the quota is the winner.
In a scenario where no one gets more votes than the figure, then candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated.
The eliminated candidate’s ballot papers are then distributed among the remaining people based on the second preference choice.
The process of counting the total votes for each candidate is then repeated to see if anyone polls above the quota.
Still, if nobody polls above the quota, the same process is then repeated until someone's votes tally up more than the quota.
If just one candidate remains at last after repeated eliminations, then he or she is declared the President of India.
