The turnout in the 2024 Jammu & Kashmir assembly elections stood at 63.9% excluding postal ballots (which will be tallied later), data released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday showed. The turnout in the third and final phase of voting was 69.7%.
While the proportion of registered electors who cast their votes in the assembly polls is likely to inch higher when postal ballots are added up, the turnout as it stands is 1.6 percentage points lower than that recorded in the last assembly elections held in 2014. To be sure, the turnout in the assembly polls is higher than the 58.5% figure recorded in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year.
A breakdown of the turnout in the UT by region shows that the 43 assembly constituencies (ACs) of the Jammu region recorded a turnout of 73.2% and the 47 ACs of the Kashmir region recorded a turnout of 55.5%. These regions had recorded a turnout of 75.9% and 56.5%, respectively, in 2014. This means that the Jammu region has registered a bigger drop in turnout than the Kashmir region.
A similar comparison is not possible at the AC-level because the boundaries of the UT’s ACs were changed in 2022 in a delimitation exercise conducted after the erstwhile state was split (to carve out the Ladakh region into a separate UT) and downgraded to a UT in 2019. The UT-level and regional historical turnout anlaysed here is after removing the Ladakh region.
{{/usCountry}}A similar comparison is not possible at the AC-level because the boundaries of the UT’s ACs were changed in 2022 in a delimitation exercise conducted after the erstwhile state was split (to carve out the Ladakh region into a separate UT) and downgraded to a UT in 2019. The UT-level and regional historical turnout anlaysed here is after removing the Ladakh region.
{{/usCountry}}In this year’s assembly elections, the ACs that recorded the highest turnout were Inderwal (82.16%) in Kishtwar district, Marh (81.47%) in Jammu district, and Padder-Nagseni (80.67%) in Kishtwar district. They are all in the Jammu region. The ACs that recorded the lowest turnout were Habbakadal (19.81%), Khanyar (26.09%), and Chanapora (29.53%) – all three in Srinagar district in the Kashmir region.