An ADR review of the Bihar Assembly elections reveals that successful candidates won with the support of just over one-third of registered voters, raising questions about representativeness.

Winners of the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections secured mandates from only a little over one-third of the state’s electorate, according to a new report by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR). The analysis, released on Thursday, shows that successful candidates represented on average 32.01% of all registered voters, despite a marked increase in voter turnout compared with the previous election.

The report underscores what ADR describes as a continuing gap between electoral outcomes and the proportion of voters who actively choose their representatives. In the 2020 polls, winners had the backing of just 25.23% of the total electorate, meaning representativeness has risen but remains significantly low.

While candidates won with an average of 47.61% of votes polled, this figure shrinks sharply once measured against the state’s full voter base. Bihar recorded a 67.2% turnout in 2025 — a substantial jump from 58.7% in 2020 — yet the majority of elected MLAs still failed to cross even the one-third mark in terms of overall electorate support.

ADR notes that representativeness is calculated by dividing votes garnered by a winner by the total number of registered voters in the constituency. The metric, it argues, offers a clearer picture of the democratic legitimacy of elected representatives than raw vote-share percentages.

The analysis also highlights an increasingly fragmented contest, with 164 of the 243 winners securing less than 50% of the valid votes cast.