How to Win a Majority
There is a sea of orange in the map below, indicating the seats the BJP won in the just concluded elections: A lot of people were curious as to the vote share of the BJP nation-wide. Did they win a proportional number of votes? Or did they just get votes in places they won and did not have any “wasted” votes? (Here, a “wasted” vote is one cast in an electoral district where the party did not win). Equally, was the return of a single party majority a sign of the end of regional parties, at least at the national level? Was this the beginning of the move to a two party system? Good questions. Surprisingly, the first answer I saw to these questions was in the Washington Post by a non-Indian guy named Adam Ziegfeld ! So what are the answers? The BJP’s vote share this time was just 31%. In contrast, the Congress despite getting decimated got 19%. It was the distribution of votes that mattered: the BJP hardly had any “wasted” votes. To understand how “useful” every BJP vote w...