Election of President

The President of India is elected by an electoral college that's formed by 776 parliamentarians and 4,120 legislators. The total strength of the electoral college is 10,98,882 votes and the halfway mark is 5,49,442 votes.

Article 55(3) of Indian Constitution requires that the President should be elected in accordance with the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote. The best known form of Proportional Representation is that of the "Single Transferable Vote", which means that each elector has only one vote, irrespective of the number of seats to be filled up.

For instance, if there are six seats to be filled up, the elector does not cast six votes but indicates six successive preferences, by marking his first preference and the succeeding preferences with the appropriate numerals against the name of candidates printed on his ballot paper.

Quota of Votes

In the ordinary straight voting system a candidate who secures the highest number of votes is declared elected, while under the Proportional Representation system any member who secures the necessary quota of votes is declared elected.

There are several ways of finding out the quota, but the most common method is to divide the total number of valid votes cast by the total number of seats in the constituency plus one and add one to the quotient.

Each successful candidate's surplus votes of first preferences which are now of no use to him, are transferred to other candidates proportionately to the second preferences indicated on the whole of his papers (except that the second preferences shown for any other candidate already elected are ignored and the third preferences on those papers taken instead).

The point is that every vote shall be made effective and not allowed to go waste, while under the ordinary system of representation, the votes of many electors are of no use.

Every member of the Legislative Assembly (Vidhan Sabha) of a state has to cast as many votes as there are multiples of one thousand in the quotient obtained by dividing the population of the State by the total number of elected members of the Assembly, and if, after taking the said multiples of one thousand, the remainder is not less than five hundred, the votes of each member referred to above are further increased by one.