The conduct of elections in India demands substantial manpower, particularly polling personnel (PP), to
carry out the poll at polling stations (PSs). This paper estimates the potential reduction in PP deployment
under a simultaneous election framework. There are other potential benefits of simultaneous elections, but
they are outside the scope of this paper.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has benchmarks for the deployment of PP per PS for different
kinds of elections. According to these, the composition of a polling party for a PS is a Presiding Officer
(PRO) plus 3 Polling Officers (POs) for a State Assembly election, a PRO plus 4 POs for a Lok Sabha
election, and a PRO plus 5 POs for a simultaneous election. These benchmarks are tested against actual
PP deployment numbers for certain election cycles and found to provide a good fit. Thus, using ECI
benchmarks, we get a gross baseline reduction of 33 percent in PP deployment under the simultaneous
election framework. This is because while 9 PP are required per PS to conduct a poll separately for State
Assembly (PRO plus 3 POs) and Lok Sabha (PRO plus 4 POs), only 6 PP are required per PS to
conduct a simultaneous poll (PRO plus 5 POs).
