Congress to analyse booth level poll data to review Haryana loss

This will be the first time that the party will analyse poll data right up to the booth level and virtually “reconstruct” the polling patterns.

In the Jat belt of Rohtak, the Congress bagged more than a thousand votes in a booth during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Five months later, the party got just 62 votes from that very booth during the assembly polls.

The Congress, which was heavily tipped to sweep the Haryana elections by pollsters and pundits, ended up winning 37 seats in the 90-member assembly, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) managed to grab 48 seats to claim a historic hat-trick. (ANI)

In Uchana Kalan, the BJP’s Devender Chatar Bhuj Attari won by 32 votes against the Congress’s Brijendra Singh while independent candidate Virender Ghogharian bagged 31,456 votes.

Such deviations and the party’s shocking defeat have now forced Congress analysts to dive deep into poll data to come out with a more probable answer as to what really went wrong, instead of dishing out the old excuse of discrepancies in EVMs (electronic voting machines).

This will be the first time that the party will analyse poll data right up to the booth level and virtually “reconstruct” the polling patterns to find out the unexpected problems it faced in Haryana. This process will be conducted parallel to the ongoing political analysis of the defeat.

“We will take 4-5 days to complete the process. It is important to know what really went wrong at the polling level as not just our internal surveys but also all exit polls had predicted that the Congress will win. This has never happened when all exit polls have been proved wrong,” said a senior Congress leader.

A second Congress functionary confirmed that leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi is also keen to understand the possible problems arising out of the polling pattern that led the Congress to lose an important election in north India to the BJP.

The Congress, which was heavily tipped to sweep the Haryana elections by pollsters and pundits, ended up winning 37 seats in the 90-member assembly, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) managed to grab 48 seats to claim a historic hat-trick.

The party held a review meeting last week. After the meeting, Congress treasurer and an observer in Haryana Ajay Maken said, “In your channels, the exit polls were shown but the results were unexpected. Nobody thought such results will come that would be entirely different from the exit polls. We discussed the possible reasons of this defeat. We will also take measures.”

The Congress alleged that during the counting of votes in Haryana, EVMs had different battery capacities in at least 7 assembly seats, calling it a glaring discrepancy. While some EVMs had 99% charge, others had 60-70%, the party said in a memorandum to the EC.

The Congress analysis will look at the major deviations in poll patterns between the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the recent assembly polls. The Congress bagged 5 of the 10 seats from Haryana in the Lok Sabha polls but failed to retain that momentum.

“We would also look at places where not-so-strong independents got a massive share of votes,” said a leader who is involved in the process. The Congress lost a few seats to heavy polling for independent candidates.

While the move will be of little help for the party in Haryana, where it failed to woo non-Jat voters leading to a debacle, analysts involved in the process maintain that such an exercise “will be important for future elections and developing our data models for poll surveys”.