Indian election data for polling stations and villages: National elections 2009–2019

This is a data set covering polling-station-level election returns from the 2009, 2014, and 2019 Indian general elections. Polling stations are the lowest level at which election returns are released. We have collected, cleaned, and standardized data on votes cast for each candidate across about 500,000 polling stations in 11 states for 2009 and 2014 and about 162,000 polling stations from one state for 2019. Polling-station numbers change between elections, while census units are more stable and can be traced over time. Using census indicators, we manually link polling stations to villages and towns in their catchment area, making it possible to merge the election data with census data and to observe local-level voting patterns over time. Our manual approach enabled us to link about 95% of the polling stations to corresponding census units and ensured a high degree of data reliability. Our data can be used at the polling-station level or collapsed to the level of census units: we identified the corresponding villages or towns for 95% of the polling stations we had data on in 2009 and 98% in 2014. On average, there are about 1.4 PSs per census unit. Collapsing the election data to the census-unit level allows us to estimate voting patterns in more than 330,000 villages and towns in 2009 and about 360,000 villages and towns in 2014. For 2019, we were able to identify the village or town of almost 140,000 PSs, which amounts to more than 83,000 villages and towns when collapsed to the census-unit level.