As NOTA comes under question, numbers show its diminishing preference among voters
In the Supreme Court, during a hearing on a plea challenging the Constitutional validity of uncontested elections, the Election Commission (EC) said that NOTA – the 'none of the above' option available to voters on Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) – is a 'failed idea'.
'It is creating no impact on the elections. It may be a case where some candidates get less than NOTA, but the winning candidates are never impacted by it,' Senior Advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for the EC, told the Supreme Court on April 25.
The NOTA option was introduced in 2013 by a Supreme Court directive based on a 2004 public interest litigation filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties. The option sits last after names of all the candidates in an election, and has its own symbol, of a ballot paper with a black cross on it on EVMs.
In late 2013, five Assembly elections – in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Mizoram – were the first to see NOTA as an option. The 2014 Lok Sabha elections were the first at a national level with NOTA in operation.
The Supreme Court had hoped that a NOTA vote would 'encourage political participation' and also persuade parties to consider their candidate choices more carefully.
'Negative voting will lead to a systemic change in polls and political parties will be forced to project clean candidates. If the right to vote is a statutory right, then the right to reject a candidate is a fundamental right of speech and expression under the Constitution,' said the Bench led by then Chief Justice of India P Sathasivam, which gave the order.
However, critics feel NOTA hasn't resulted in 'systemic' changes, owing to its inherent features. NOTA votes do not contribute towards the result as there is no provision for re-polling if NOTA gets the most votes in a constituency.
In March 2021, the Supreme Court issued notices to the Centre and the EC on a petition seeking that election results be nullified and fresh polls held if NOTA secures maximum votes. However, NOTA and the provisions on it remain unchanged.
NOTA in Lok Sabha polls
In its 2014 Lok Sabha election debut, NOTA polled 60.03 lakh votes, accounting for 1.1% of the overall vote shares. In 2019, the number of NOTA votes rose to 65.23 lakh, but its vote share fell to 1.07%. By 2024, even the number of NOTA votes dropped, to 63.72 lakh or 1% of the vote share.
Since 2014, the highest vote share for NOTA was recorded in 2024 in the Indore Lok Sabha constituency at 13.99%, making it the second-highest vote getter in the seat, which was won by the BJP. In Indore, Madhya Pradesh's most populous constituency, the Congress candidate had withdrawn at the last minute, leaving the party without a nominee. Rather than back one of the 14 remaining candidates, the Congress launched an aggressive campaign asking voters to choose NOTA and teach the BJP 'a lesson'.
Besides Indore, there have been just two instances of NOTA crossing the 5% vote-share mark – Chhattisgarh's Naxal-impacted Bastar in 2014 and Bihar's Scheduled Caste-reserved Gopalganj in 2019, both at 5.04%.
NOTA has played a considerable role in Bastar – in each of the last three Lok Sabha polls, NOTA polled the third highest votes behind the Congress and BJP candidates. In this seat, even notable parties like the BSP and CPI received fewer votes than NOTA. It's a similar story in Gopalganj, where NOTA placed third in 2019 and 2024, and fourth in 2014. Notably, even the Dalit-oriented BSP was unable to outdo NOTA in the SC-reserved seat.
In fact, NOTA has exceeded 1% of the vote share in a seat in 709 instances since 2014; in the remaining 918 instances, NOTA failed to cross even 1% of the vote share.
On average, each seat has polled 11,609 NOTA votes since 2014. In 2014, the first Narendra Modi wave election, the average was 11,055 votes, going up to 12,017 in 2019 (when Modi-led BJP returned to power with a even bigger majority) before dropping to 11,756 in 2024 (when the Congress put up its best performance in three general elections).
In 2014, Puducherry saw NOTA get the highest vote share at 3.01%, followed by Meghalaya at 2.8%. That year, 20 states and UTs saw NOTA clear the 1% vote-share mark.
In 2019, Bihar had the highest NOTA vote share at 2%, with 17 states and UTs seeing NOTA's vote share cross 1%. In 2024, Bihar again topped the country at 2.07% NOTA vote share, followed by Dadra and Nagar Haveli at 2.06%.
However, just 13 states and UTs recorded a NOTA vote share above 1% in 2024.
There is also a correlation between the number of candidates and NOTA's vote share. Across the last three Lok Sabha polls, the seats with more candidates tended to see NOTA receive relatively fewer votes than in seats with fewer candidates. In seats that had more than 20 candidates, there was a marked drop-off in the number of NOTA votes, compared to seats with less than 20 candidates.
[TABLE: State-wise highest NOTA vote share in Lok Sabha polls]
Where NOTA made a difference
Over the last three Lok Sabha elections, NOTA has polled more votes than the winning margin – an indication of the option's potential to swing an election outcome – on 64 occasions since 2014.
In 2014, there were 23 such seats, with the highest in Karnataka and Odisha at three each. In 2019, there were 25 seats where NOTA votes exceeded the margin, with Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal recording four seats each. In 2024, the number of such seats fell to 16, with Uttar Pradesh topping the list at six.
Just five seats have seen NOTA votes exceed the winning margin more than once – Chhattisgarh's Kanker, Jharkhand's Lohardaga, Odisha's Koraput and Nabarangpur, and West Bengal's Arambagh.
NOTA in Assembly polls
To date, in all state Assembly elections since NOTA was introduced in 2013, the option has received a total 1.73 crore votes, accounting for just 1.12% of the vote share.
In its debut year in 2013, NOTA was available in five Assembly elections, garnering a combined vote share of 1.96%. NOTA's vote share peaked in 2015 – when only Delhi and Bihar went to polls – at 2.09%. Since then, though, NOTA's vote share has been on a gradual decline, falling to 0.9% in 2023 and 2024, when eight states held Assembly polls in each year. In the most recent Assembly poll, in Delhi earlier this year, with the BJP seen in a tight contest with the AAP, NOTA accounted for just 0.57% of the vote share. Between 2013 and 2025, NOTA's vote share was below 1% in six years.
[CHART: Year-wise NOTA vote share in Assembly polls]Of the 76 Assembly elections held since NOTA's introduction, the option has received more than 1% of the overall vote share in 37 polls – the highest was recorded in Chhattisgarh in 2013 at 3.07%, followed by Bihar in 2015 at 2.48%.
At the individual seat level, there have been only three instances when NOTA's vote share crossed 10% – in 2019, Maharashtra's Latur Rural seat saw 13.78% of the vote go to NOTA, followed by the western state's Gadchiroli in 2014 at 10.8%, and Chhattisgarh's Bijapur in 2013 at 10.15%.
In the 2019 Assembly contest for Latur Rural, NOTA was the second-highest vote-getter behind the Congress's Dhiraj Deshmukh, the son of former Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. Deshmukh was up against a candidate from the then undivided Shiv Sena, which was allied with the BJP. However, BJP workers in the seat were unhappy that the constituency was assigned to the Sena in seat-sharing talks. A district poll official said there were protests by BJP workers and pamphlets were also found urging voters to choose NOTA.
There have been 42 instances of NOTA crossing the 5% vote-share threshold, 4,244 cases of NOTA hovering between 1% and 5%, and 5,617 instances of NOTA failing to cross 1%.
[TABLE: State-wise highest NOTA vote share in Assembly polls]There are, however, 601 instances of NOTA polling more votes than the winning margin. Madhya Pradesh has had the most such cases at 68, followed by Bihar at 51, Rajasthan at 43, Maharashtra at 41, and West Bengal at 39. Among these states, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra have each held three Assembly elections in the period since NOTA was introduced, while states like Bihar and West Bengal have held only two Assembly polls each.
However, in a vast majority of elections, specifically in 9,302 cases, NOTA votes did not exceed the margin, and thus had little impact on the ultimate outcome.
There are at least 38 seats where NOTA votes have exceeded the winning margin in two separate elections.
While there is no clear correlation between tightly contested elections – that is, seats where the winning margins are small – and the number of NOTA votes, the general trend is that low NOTA vote shares are often accompanied by low margins of victory. Despite the popular perception that high NOTA votes could lead to tighter contests, data shows that even when NOTA's vote share is high, it does not necessarily impact the competitiveness of an election.
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