The Indian summer is too hot for elections

livemint.com:

How do you run a democracy when the mercury rises above 40° Celsius? That’s the problem faced by voters in India. A swathe of the country’s east is sweltering under a brutal heatwave. The city centre of Kolkata has emptied out, schools have cancelled classes, and one TV presenter collapsed on air with heat stroke.

The first round of 7-phase general elections, which took place on Friday, seems to have been another casualty: turnout was down four percentage points relative to the last poll in 2019, as reported. Multiple officials quoted by the paper cited the effect of extreme heat, adding also that a wedding season and general apathy may have been factors. Some of the most intense temperatures last week were on the east coast, keenly watched battlegrounds where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has traditionally been weak relative to its performance in the north and west.

There were about 7.6 million fewer voters in the 102 seats polled Friday, as per estimates by Yogendra Yadav, an election analyst and political activist. The world’s largest democracy is going to struggle more with this as the planet warms. It will have to overhaul its hulking electoral machinery to keep up.

The length of voting lines in US federal elections are a perennial scandal, prompting lawsuits, protests and a Curb Your Enthusiasm story line. The challenges you’ll face standing around in the middle of fall in the US are nothing, however, compared to an Indian pre-monsoon heatwave. There’s both idealistic and cynical reasons to change.