New Delhi:
India's Electoral College that will vote for a new president July 19 is made up of 4,896 members - 776 members of parliament and 4,120 members of the state assemblies. Between them they have 10,97,012 votes and the winning candidate needs at least 50 per cent of these.
How do numbers stack up?
- The ruling United Progressive Alliance, in its present form, has 450,555 votes or 41.07 per cent of the total. Of this, the Congress alone has 331,855 votes, or 30.3 per cent of the total.
- The allies - among them the Trinamool Congress and the DMK - have 11.04 per cent of the vote.
- The Samajwadi Party, which supports the government from outside, has 6.34 per cent of the vote.
- The Trinamool Congress has 4.40 per cent of the vote.
- If the Trinamool and the Samajwadi Party vote with the government, this will give it 47.41 per cent of the ballots - a shortfall of a mere 2.59 per cent.
- Should these two parties not vote with the government, it will be short by 13.33 per cent.
- The National Democratic Alliance has 27.7 per cent of the votes, of which the Bharatiya Janata Party has 21.2 per cent.
- The Left has 4.7 per cent of the vote.
- Among the other parties, the BSP has 3.98 per cent of the votes and the AIADMK 3.3 per cent.
- In the "others" category are 10.1 per cent of the votes.
To calculate the number of voters each legislator represents, the total population of the state is divided by the number of legislatures and then divided by 1,000.
For example, each member of Uttar Pradesh assembly represents 208 voters, while a member from Sikkim represents seven voters.
The value of vote of each MP is uniform at 708.