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Methodology

Three kinds of information

  1. Historical election results are official outcomes published by the Election Commission of India, as compiled by third parties and imported here. They are stored and shown separately from everything else.
  2. Open website polls are answered by whoever visits the site. Participants are self-selecting and unverified, and the respondents are not a random sample of India. Results describe only the people who responded and must not be read as the opinion of a state, a constituency or the country, or as a forecast.
  3. Representative surveys use a documented sampling design and weighting. Bharatvote.in does not currently publish any. If it ever does, they will be labelled separately with the method.

How polls are protected

We use rate limits, per-poll duplicate checks, server-side validation and moderation. These reduce abuse but cannot guarantee one person, one response. Location is declared by the respondent (PIN code) and is not verified.

Small areas

Breakdowns for a state or PIN code are hidden until enough responses exist to protect respondents and avoid misleading numbers.

Vote share and seat share

Vote share is the share of votes a party received. Seat share is the share of seats it won. They are different and are never combined.

Boundaries

Constituency boundaries change (delimitation). Comparisons across years assume the same constituency name refers to a comparable area and carry a caveat when data suggests otherwise.