Indian election data for polling stations and villages: national elections 2009-2019

This paper describes the creation of a dataset covering polling-station-level election returns from the 2009, 2014, and 2019 Indian general elections. Indian elections are the largest in the world, and parliamentary constituencies are enormous. Within-constituency analysis is therefore crucial to address important political questions. 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 112,000 polling stations from one state for 2019. Polling-station numbers change between elections, while census numbers have not changed since 2011. We therefore manually linked polling stations to the 2011 census identifiers of the villages and towns in their catchment areas, making it possible to merge local-level election data with census data and to observe local-level voting patterns over time. Our manual approach enabled us to link 95%-98% of the polling stations to corresponding census units and ensured a high degree of data reliability.