60% West Bengal voters want EC to either have single-phase polling or cancel all three

 Forty-three per cent of the voters want political parties and leaders to suspend their election campaigns.

Women stand in a queue to cast their vote at a polling station during the 5th phase of West Bengal Assembly elections at Santipur, in Nadia | PTI

RAJESH JAIN, THE PRINT, 21 April, 2021: The marathon West Bengal election is yet to see three more phases of polling in the remaining 114 constituencies out of the 294 even as India is in the middle of a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Thirty-two million voters are still to cast their vote in Bengal.

It is not for the first time that the Election Commission has scheduled a lengthy election. But the surge in Covid cases has forced the poll panel to seriously consider the fate of the remaining phases of the hotly contested Bengal election. There is a raging debate among commentators in the media as well about what the EC should do.

There have been calls to cancel campaigns and public rallies. Yet others, including the ruling Trinamool Congress, have called for the merger of the remaining phases into one. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has cancelled his campaign rallies citing the second wave. The EC has curtailed campaign timings and banned campaigning between 7pm and 10am.

While there is a lot of discussion and debate around, it is perhaps important to find out what the 32 million voters of Bengal in these yet-to-vote constituencies think. This is exactly what we did.

Using our proprietary state-of-the-art statistical polling engine, Prashnam, we designed and executed a scientific survey of voters in these 114 constituencies. Voters from these constituencies were sampled using a stratified randomised sampling technique and asked two questions.

1: Should political parties and leaders suspend their election campaigns totally due to rising Covid cases?

2: Should the Election Commission merge the remaining three phases of elections into one phase?

There were 1,054 respondent voters, 48 per cent males and 52 per cent females from 101 constituencies — a fair representation of the underlying population. Eighty-five per cent of the respondents were youth (<30 years), 13 per cent were middle-aged (30-60 years), and two per cent were old (>60 years).

Graphic by Soham Sen | ThePrint

43 per cent of the yet-to-vote voters surveyed want political parties and leaders to suspend their election campaign. Only 29 per cent want the election campaigns to continue in the current form.

Similarly, 44 per cent of voters want the EC to merge the remaining phases of elections into one phase. 28 per cent want the EC to continue with the current plan. Surprisingly, a significant 14 per cent of voters want the EC to cancel the remaining phases all together.

So, nearly 60 (44+14) per cent of Bengal’s voters in the 114 constituencies that are set to go to polls in the remaining three phases either want the elections to be merged into one phase or cancelled completely. The message is resoundingly clear for the EC from the people of Bengal.

Often, important decisions in public or private life are debated, discussed and taken without considering the views of the people who are key stakeholders and the ones to be impacted. With modern methods of survey techniques, it need not be the case anymore. Quick scientific surveys that accurately reflect people’s views and opinions can be undertaken to serve as a critical input for decision making.

As a matter of rigour and transparency, we have made available the entire raw data of this survey for interested people to verify, test and validate.

Rajesh Jain is founder, Prashnam, an AI technology start-up that aims to make opinion gathering more scientific, easy, fast, and affordable. Views are personal.

The article is part of ThePrint-Prashnam Vox Pop series.