Presidential poll on July 17: Election Commission

With President Pranab Mukherjee’s term coming to an end on 24th July, the much-anticipated Presidential election will be held on 17th July and counting will be held on 20th July.

With this announcement the Election Commission sounded the bugle for the poll.

While discussions are on in the NDA camp on its choice for next President, talks in the Opposition camp have been inconclusive.

President Pranab Mukherjee’s term as the country’s 13th President, ends on July 25, 2017. The elections will be held for the 14th President of the country. Meanwhile, opposition parties have not yet been able to arrive at a consensus on a candidate, while the government is also engaged in discussions with its party and allies on the matter again with no consensus.

India’s presidential elections are conducted by indirect voting i.e. representatives elected by the public choose the President who is elected by an electoral college in which both houses of Parliament and elected members of state assemblies are included.

Apart from them, MLAs from two union territories, Delhi and Puducherry also participate in the elections because they have their own legislative assemblies. In this process, all MPs and legislators have a certain number of votes.

In order to calculate the votes of the legislators of the states, the total population of the state is divided by the number of elected MLAs to get the ratio of votes. After this, the result is divided by 1000, and then the number of votes of a legislator from the state emerges from the number of points received.

This time, in the presidential election, 4176 legislators of the Legislative Assembly will vote in addition to 776 MPs of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. The total value of these 4896 people’s representatives is 10.98 lakh.

That is, for a party to get a president of its choice elected it would have to garner votes with a value of 5.49 lakh rupees. At present, the ruling NDA has about 48.64 percent of the votes.

At the same time, the percentage of possible 23 parties going to the Congress-led opposition is about 35.47 . In such a situation, the role of Aam Aadmi Party, Biju Janata Dal, Indian National Lok Dal, YSR Congress, Trinamool Congress and AIADMK, which has a vote price of around 13 percent, becomes crucial.