While almost all political parties, particularly regional parties, have been fielding candidates according to caste equations of the constituencies, an end-line survey ordered by the Election Commission during UP Assembly elections in 2012 has revealed that the most important factor influencing voters is the candidates' political experience, not caste.

Around 32.86 per cent electors cast their votes going by the candidates' political experience  the most important factor influencing voters. The second important criteria was honesty of the candidates, according to 31.65 per cent voters. Only 11 per cent electors had given votes to candidates of their own community. Other criteria included personality of the candidate and the voter's acquaintance with candidate.

On the directive of the EC, the survey had been conducted by the Lucknow-based Giri Institute of Development Studies. It submitted the survey report to Chief Electoral Officer of UP recently. The survey was regarding knowledge, attitude, behaviour and practices (KABP) guiding the electors in UP. Dr B K Bajpai, head of the survey project, said: "The 'honesty' that voters talked about was fulfilment of promises by the same candidate when he was elected in the past elections."

During the study, feedback was collected from 8,400 sample electors in 42 sample Assembly constituencies in 14 districts, including Sitapur, Faizabad, Gorakhpur, Ballia, Varanasi, Allahabad, Lucknow, Banda, Lalitpur, Firozabad, Agra, Mathura, Bareilly and Moradabad. In the sample, about 28 per cent were illiterate and around 25 per cent had primary level education. Class X and XII-level education was only among 17 and 15 per cent respondents, respectively. Only around 12 per cent respondents had high-level education.

Of the 40 per cent registered voters who did not vote in the 2012 Assembly elections, around 7 per cent did not cast vote as they did not find their names in the voters' list, over 6 per cent did not have voters' slip, around 6 per cent did not vote because they did not have electoral photo-identity cards, around 5 per cent were unaware of their polling centre, 5 per cent did not vote due to transportation problems and 7 per cent could not vote as they were scared of going to the polling centres. Around 1.13 per cent voters reported a security threat of high order, but 5.67 per cent found little security threat. According to the survey, the role of community leaders' messages in increasing the voter turnout was not really high. Only 38.75 per cent respondent voters felt that community leaders' message was a factor in high turnout.

More than 12 per cent sample voters reported difficulties in voting at polling centres. The difficulties included threat by booth agents of political parties, long queues, lack of water, toilets, ramps, locating polling station and getting voter slip. Around 3.71 per cent female and 2.36 per cent male respondents said that polling staff was non-cooperative at the booths.

Fourteen major reasons were reported for voting. These included sympathy for a political party, scared of consequences, asked by the head of family, peer pressure, wanted a particular party or candidate to lose, a sense of responsibility, repeated appeals by EC, candidate of own choice or community, money and alcohol. UP's Chief Electoral Officer Umesh Sinha said, "According to the report, making voter slips available to voters at home and awareness campaigns played an important role in increasing the voter turnout in the 2012 Assembly elections." The voting was a record 59.4 per cent.

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