How India will elect its next President

India will soon know who will be the successor to Ram Nath Kovind. Nearly 4,800 elected MPs and MLAs will vote on Monday to elect the 15th President of India. The BJP has fielded Droupadi Murmu, former Jharkhand Governor and tribal leader, who will take on Opposition candidate Yashwant Sinha, a former union minister in the Vajpayee government.

The polling will take place in Parliament House and state legislative assemblies for which ballot boxes have already reached their destinations.

The counting of votes will take place at Parliament House on July 21 and the next President will take oath on July 25. Kovind's tenure ends on July 24.



An explainer on India's 16th presidential election:

Is the President elected the same way like our parliamentarians?
No. The President of India is elected by the members of an Electoral College consisting of – the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the Legislative Assemblies of the States (including the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi and the Union Territory of Puducherry), according to Article 55 of the Constitution.

The members nominated to either House of Parliament or the Legislative Assemblies of State including NCT of Delhi and UT of Puducherry are not eligible to be included in the Electoral College.

In 2017, the total number of members in the Electoral College was 4,896 (Rajya Sabha 233; Lok Sabha 543; State Assemblies 4,120). For 2022, the total number of members is 4,809 (MPs – 776; MLAs – 4,033), the Election Commission of India (EC) said. The total vote value is 10,86,431 (MPs – 5,43,200) (MLAs – 5,43,231).

Secret ballot
The election shall be held in accordance with the system of ‘Proportional Representation’ by means of the single transferable vote and the voting at such election shall be by secret ballot.

The ballot paper does not contain any election symbol. There will be two columns in the ballot paper. Column 1 of the ballot paper contains the heading “Name of Candidate” and column 2 contains the heading “order of preference”.

Each Elector shall have as many preferences as there are contesting candidates, but no ballot paper shall be considered invalid solely on the ground that all such preferences are not marked.

The all important 50-member cushion
The nomination papers will have to be delivered in Election Commission office, in New Delhi, and would need at least 50 members of electoral college as proposers and another 50 as seconders. The security deposit was increased from Rs2,500 to Rs15,000 in 1997, when the total numbers of proposers and seconders were also increased from 10 each earlier.The move aimed at weeding out non-serious candidates in these polls that once saw nominations getting rejected for 36 out of total 37 candidates.

How votes are calculated
The Constitution also stipulates that there shall be uniformity, as far as practicable, in the scale of representation of the different States at the election (Article 55). The total value of votes of all members of each State Assembly is worked out by multiplying the number of elective seats in the Assembly by the number of votes for each member. The total value of votes of all the States added together is divided by the total number of elected members of Parliament (Lok Sabha + Rajya Sabha) to get the value of votes per each Member of Parliament.

A quick recap
In 2017, the presidential polls were held on July 17 and the counting took place on July 20. Ram Nath Kovind, who was elected as President of India, got 7,02,044 votes, while his opponent, the joint Opposition candidate, Meira Kumar, got 3,67,314 out of a total of 10,69,358.