Why India's voter turnout is low and improving it will be complicated

Its numbers trail those of several developing countries like Indonesia and Brazil

Around 340,000 more people turned out to vote in the United States in 2010 because of a “single election-day message on Facebook”, according to a 2012 study published in Nature. The rise in turnout followed an experiment on 61 million Facebook users.

The worry about voter turnout in India’s ongoing parliamentary elections follows a strong show in 2014 and 2019. Turnout was under 67 per cent in the first two phases of the seven-round elections. It is 3-4 percentage points lower than in the same seats in the 2019 election. The number reflects the percentage