Voting for the 16th presidential election ended on Monday. Counting will be on Thursday (Toady). The contest is between BJP-led NDA alliance candidate Draupadi Murmu and Yashwant Sinha of opposition camps including Congress, NCP, SP, Trinamool and Left. History tells us that 14 out of the previous 15 times, the number one citizen of the country has been contested. A total of 14 people became president. Only one first president, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, went to Raisina, winning twice.
Rajendra Prasad also holds the record of winning the presidential election by getting the most votes. On the other hand, VV Giri in 1969 won the presidential election with the lowest number of votes. In 1957, Rajendra Prasad got 98.99 percent of the total votes. That record still stands today. Before that, he won the country's first presidential election in 1952 with 83.81 percent votes. In the second presidential election on May 6, 1957, out of 464,000 votes, Rajendra Prasad got more than 4,59,000 votes. The other two contenders in that election, Choudhury Hari Ram and Narayan Das, did not even cross the three thousand mark.
Neelam Sanjeev Reddy is the only example of an unopposed victory in the presidential election. In 1977, he submitted his nomination as a candidate supported by the then ruling Janata Party. The nominations of 36 of Reddy's rivals were cancelled. Incidentally, the Congress Working Committee and Parliamentary Board nominee Neelam Sanjeev Reddy lost the 1969 presidential election! VV Giri won with the lowest number of votes in the history of the presidential elections.The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appealed to Congress MLAs to 'conscience vote' in support of independent candidate VV Giri in that election. It is alleged that Reddy lost to Giri in a subotage attempt by Indira supporters. In 1969, the total number of valid votes cast in the presidential election was 8 lakh 25 thousand 504. Independent candidate supported by Indira got 4 lakh 20 thousand 77 votes. That is, about 50.9 percent. That time Giri's rival Congress candidate Reddy got 4 lakh 5 thousand 427 votes. 49.1 as a percentage.
The precedent of winning the presidential election with the second lowest number of votes was in 1967. That time the winning candidate Zakir Hussain got 56.2 percent votes. A total of 4 lakh 71 thousand 244. In the 1967 presidential election, the number of valid votes was 8 lakh 38 thousand 170. Zakir's main rival, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Koka Subba Rao got 3 lakh 63 thousand 971 (43.4 percent).
Ramnath Kovind got 7 lakh 2 thousand 44 votes out of 10 lakh 69 thousand 358 valid votes in the 15th presidential election in 2017. 65.65 as percentage. This is the lowest number of votes for a presidential candidate in the history of the last four decades. In the 2017 election, Ramnath's rival and former Lok Sabha speaker Meera Kumar got 3 lakh 67 thousand 314 votes. Meera, a candidate supported by several opposition parties including the Congress, got about 34.35 percent of the votes.
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