Bihar was leading the tally of voters opting for the None of The Above (NOTA) option while exercising their franchise in the 17th Lok Sabha polls.
As per election commission data at midnight, the NOTA vote share stood at about 2 per cent of the total votes polled in the state, where results of almost all the 40 seats had been declared.
In the states of UP, Gujarat and West Bengal, 0.84 per cent, 1.38 per cent, 0.96 per cent votes were cast in favour of NOTA. The counting was still on for a few seats in each of these states.
NOTA, which was introduced in India following a 2013 Supreme Court directive, allows voters to express their dissent by pressing a button saying none of the contestants are worthy of their vote.
In 2014 Lok Sabha polls, where it was introduced for the first time in any parliamentary election, around 60 lakh voters had opted for the NOTA option equalling about 1.1 per cent of the total votes polled during those elections across 543 seats.
In 2019 elections, in the key constituency of Varanasi the seat from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi contested the elections and won saw 4,037 voters (0.38 per cent) opting for NOTA.
The constituencies of Kerala's Wayanad where Congress scion Rahul Gandhi won from saw 2,155 voters (0.2 per cent) pressing the NOTA button.
Amongst other key constituencies where results had been declared, Amit Shah's Gandhinagar constituency saw 14214 (1.11 per cent) NOTA votes, Ravi Shankar Prasad's Patna Sahib constituency saw 5076 (0.52 per cent), and Gautam Gambhir's East Delhi constituency had 4920 (0.39 per cent) such votes.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)