India vs US elections: What you should know

NEW DELHI: With more than 200 million registered voters, the 2020 elections in the US is a massive affair. Still, it's nowhere near the biggest exercise in democracy on the planet, an honor that goes to India.


Over 910.5 million people were registered to vote during the most recent Indian general election last year.

Given that the number of Indians registered to vote is close to three times the size of the entire US population, the event has to be spread out over a 6 week period across the country's 28 states and eight union territories with 543 constituencies.


In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, 603 million people voted, i.e. almost thrice the number of total voters registered in the US.


The 2019 polling exercise cost India over $7 billion — almost equal to the annual GDP of Tajikistan. The US elections, on the other hand, are expected to cost $14 billion.

India's total electorate is equal to the sum of the electorates of the next six countries on the top electorate list.


The number of registered voters in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone is 141 million — almost equal to the number of voters in Brazil, which is the sixth-most populous country in the world.


With 67.1% turnout in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Indian was at the fifth spot in terms of total turnout. On the other hand, the US registered a turnout of 55.7% in the 2016 elections in which Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. Sweden with 82% was at the top of the list.


In some of the other most populated democratic nations, the election exercise is a complex and a cumbersome process.

Indonesia is the world's third biggest democracy and its election is close to the US in scale. During the 2019 contest, 192.9 million Indonesians were registered to vote with more than half of them aged 10 or under.

The Indonesian election is spread out over the 17,000 islands making up the country, encompassing 809,500 polling stations and a quarter of a million candidates battling for just over 20,500 seats.

The Brazilian election is split into two rounds and it follows Indonesia in terms of sheer size with nearly 147 million people registered to vote.

Elsewhere, some of the world's largest elections can be found in Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan who all hold huge contests with at least 100 million registered voters.

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