J&K saw its second best voter turnout

Jammu: With around 58% average voter turnout in five Lok Sabha seats in Jammu and Kashmir, the union territory saw its second best election performance in history. The best being 66% recorded in 1984, the data from the Election Commission of India (ECI) shows.
On Saturday, the Anantnag-Rajouri parliamentary constituency went to polls. As of midnight, the turnout was 54.46%. The number is significant when compared to 2019 – 8.98% voter participation in polling. The data from the ECI, analyzed by News18 shows that the highest voter turnout (70%) reported in the Anantnag-Rajouri Lok Sabha seat, called Anantnag before delimitation, was in 1984. It is also important to note that the turnout figures for this seat for 2024 may go up in the coming date.
With the polling completed on this seat, elections on all the five Lok Sabha seats in J&K – Baramulla, Srinagar, Jammu, Udhampur, Anantnag-Rajouri – have been completed.
This was the first general election in the valley after the abrogation of Article 370 and the enactment of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019. Ladakh was part of the erstwhile state, but is now a separate union territory.
Anantnag-Rajouri is the third Lok Sabha seat in the union territory that reported improvement in the turnout after Srinagar and Baramulla. Both the seats – Srinagar and Baramulla – reported about a 25 percentage points jump in voter turnout from 2019.
In Srinagar, the turnout was 38.49% – the highest post 1996 and fifth highest since 1967. Baramulla reported 59.10% turnout this time – the highest since 1984 and second highest since 1967. The turnout in Anantnag-Rajouri was fifth highest since 1967, and even a slight improvement in numbers can take it to the fourth position.
Voter turnout measures the percentage of voters that have actually taken part in an election. A turnout of 58% means out of every 100 voters in a seat, 58 came out to poll.
While the voter turnout in Kashmir seats have improved, Jammu saw slightly lower voter turnout than 2019. The voter turnout in the Jammu Lok Sabha seat was 72.5% in 2019, which dropped to 72.22% in 2024. In Udhampur, the drop was slightly higher – from 70.15% last time to 68.27% this time.
In Srinagar, women turnout this time improved by around 20 percentage points – from 12.67% in 2019 to 33.21% in 2024. In Baramulla, the improvement in women’s turnout was significant, from 31.76% last time to 55.63% now.
While the gender-wise data for the Anantnag-Rajouri seat is not yet available, in Udhampur, the women turnout has gone down — from 70.75% in 2019 to 69.21% now. In Jammu, there was a marginal improvement. In 2019, the seat saw 72.20% women voter turnout, against this time’s 72.71%.
On these four seats – Srinagar, Baramulla, Jammu and Udhampur – the average turnout of men this time is 61.35%, up from 47.72% in 2019. The female voter turnout on these seats has gone up from 46.84% in 2019 to 57.69% now.