Lok Sabha elections 2024 | Trivia: A peep into the history of Indian elections

Take a look at interesting tidbits of history associated with the Lok Sabha elections.

New Delhi: When India went to the first elections, the country had only one Election Commissioner -- Sukumar Sen, an ICS officer who conducted the first two general elections post independence.

For the elections, Sen used the All India Radio and cinema halls to persuade people to vote. A documentary This is Your Vote was screened in around 70,000 cinema halls across the country during the 1957 general elections.

According to historian Ramachandra Guha, two million steel ballot boxes were used in 2.24 lakh polling booths in the first general elections. For the making of these boxes, 8,200 tonnes of steel was required. Around 16,500 clerks were appointed on six-month contracts for typing and collating the electoral rolls. About 3.80 lakh reams of paper were used for printing the rolls.

The first election spanned over four months. The first to go to poll was Chini tehsil in Himachal Pradesh on October 25, 1951, and the whole process ended in February the next year. However, the 1957 polls ended in 18 days.

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The story of elections in India started with the formal setting up of the Election Commission on January 25, 1950, a day before the country became a republic. However, Sen was appointed on March 21, 1950. The ball was set rolling for future elections in the country on May 12, 1950, and August 17, 1951, when the Parliament passed laws in this regard.

The first Presidential election was held after the constitution of the Parliament and state Assemblies, and Rajendra Prasad assumed the office on May 13, 1952, after the elections. After the General elections, the Commission recognised 14 parties as multi-state parties and 59 state parties.

At present, there are six national parties.

The first two elections were different from all other elections in the country. The Election Commission adopted the ‘balloting’ system of voting in which every candidate was allotted a separate ballot box and the voter was required only to drop the ballot paper into the box of the candidate of his choice.

But it changed from the third elections, in 1962, when the Commission switched over to the ‘ marking system’. Under this system, a common ballot paper containing the names and election symbols of all contesting candidates is printed, on which the voter has to put a mark with an arrow, cross mark, or rubber stamp on, or near the symbol of the candidate of his choice. All the marked ballot papers are put into a common ballot box.

The experiment with Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) started with the Assembly elections in Kerala in 1982 when parts of the Parur constituency witnessed its use on an experimental basis. The 1998 Lok Sabha polls saw extensive use of EVMs but it took two more elections to see the demise of ballot paper. In the 2004 elections, the EVMs were used in all polling stations.

The first general election had witnessed 1,874 candidates for 489 seats but it rose to 8,070 in 2004 out of which a dismal 556 were women. Similarly, the electorate was 17.32 crore in 1952 while it rose to 71.69 crore in 2009.

(Note: This is a revised version of an article published earlier in Deccan Herald)