Election Promises Platform - Tamil Nadu

Election Manifesto plays a key role in determining the voting behavior of the voters in Tamil Nadu electoral politics. Enabling people with information about manifestos, promises, and candidate details through technology can lead to informed decision making while voting. Despite this well-known fact, there exists a lack of a platform where voters can view the consolidated promises by the contesting parties and compare the candidate details. The Chennai Hub set out to address this need for the Tamil Nadu 2021 elections.

The Tamil Nadu Election Promises Platform (electionpromises.in) aimed to empower voters with insights and data about the promises made by political parties and background information of candidates contesting in the elections. With this data, voters were able to compare promises under categories that are relevant to them and also know the background details of various candidates to make an informed voting choice. It was observed that information about party manifestos and the promises by political parties were scattered all over the internet. The hub intended to bring all this information together, and facilitate a single spot from which voters can access all the party promises, under distinct categories such as agriculture, education, employment, etc., and compare them against promises made by other contesting parties. This website was built so that the voter could be equipped with the required information before they make their voting choice. This platform was thus exclusively constructed for the Tamil Nadu State Legislative 2021 elections in both English and Tamil languages.

The Chennai Hub collated the data of more than 50 parties contesting in the Tamil Nadu 2021 elections, and detailed and categorized about 600+ promises among the different parties. The data was presented under 20 distinct focus areas for ease of area-wise comparison between parties. Further, the platform also contained the details of around 3650+ candidates in 234 constituencies contesting in the election. The footprint of the website was tracked through Google analytics. The following overall impact metrics were noted:

• Platform traction of 12 million+ citizens


• Reach of ~20% of total voter base in one of the populous states of the country (12 million out of 62.8 million)


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  Positive real time feedback from voters of the state who consumed the content stating that the website play a role in their voting decision


• Feature in 4 leading news forums


• Mention in the Wikipedia page of 16th Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly election


• Retweets by celebrities with 1M+ followers
  

The hub hopes that this project would have initiated crucial conversations about the need for informed voting by understanding the manifestoes and possibly induced a behavioral change in the voters.