Although Ram Nath Kovind, the ruling NDA’s candidate has won the presidential poll comfortably, his vote share is the lowest since 1974, show figures.
Kovind got 2930 votes with a value of 7,02,044, while his competitor Meira Kumar, the joint opposition candidate, secured 1844 votes with a value of 3,67,314.
This comes to a vote share of 65.65% for the President-elect. However, the success margin is the lowest since the 1974 presidential poll.
As per Election Commission data, Kovind’s immediate predecessor Pranab Mukherjee (2012) secured 69.31% votes while Pratibha Patil (2007) got 65.82% of the total votes. This is slightly higher than the share secured by Kovind.
Apart from that KR Narayanan (1997) and APJ Abdul Kalam (2002) got 94.97% and 89.57% respectively – the maximum victory percentages since 1974. While Gyani Zail Singh (1982) got 72.73% votes, R Venkatraman (1987) bagged 72.28%. Shankar Dayal Sharma (1992) got 65.87 %.
Except Narayanan, only two presidents, Rajendra Prasad (98.99%) in 1957, and Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan (98.24%) in 1962, secured more than 90% of the votes. Only Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy (1977) was elected unopposed to the top constitutional post.
The lowest margin of win for any presidential poll was during the 1969 poll when then President V V Girri secured just 48% of the total votes.
