Former Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party convenor Arvind Kejriwal has lost from the New Delhi constituency, to BJP's Pravesh Verma by a margin of a little over 4,000 votes.
Kejriwal has been winning the seat since 2013, when he had defeated three-term Congress Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.
While Kejriwal's loss is a huge political embarrassment for him, there is one aspect in the constituency that needs a deeper analysis.
The Quint has examined the data provided by the Election Commission and found that the New Delhi seat saw a massive deletion of voters in the last five years.
Around one in four voters who were eligible to vote in the 2020 Assembly elections, were removed from the voters' list by 2025.
What Are the Numbers?
In the 2020 Assembly elections, there were 1,46,122 registered as voters in the New Delhi constituency.
When the 2024 Lok Sabha elections took place, the number of registered voters had reduced to 1,06,365, a decrease of 39,757 votes, and around 27.2 percent. This means that 27.2 percent voters eligible to vote in 2020, were no longer in the voters' list in 2024.
Please note, we are referring to the total number of voters listed in that seat and not the people who actually voted.
The total number of voters in New Delhi increased by 2,209 between the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and 2025 Assembly elections. So even if one compares the total number of voters between the 2020 and 2025 Assembly elections, the total reduction is over 37,000 votes or 25.7 percent. Then means one in four voters who were part of the voters' list in 2020 were deleted by 2025.
During the election campaign in Delhi, AAP accused the BJP of getting voters deleted unfairly in constituencies like New Delhi and Shahdara.
The Big Picture
While the total number of voters do change in seats between elections due to increase in population or migration, but the pattern in some constituencies in Delhi needs to be noted and New Delhi isn't an isolated case in this regard.
For instance in the Nangloi Jat constituency, the total number of voters decreased by 13,992 between 2020 and 2024 but the number increased by 16,413 between the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and 2025 Delhi elections.
Read our story to know about more such seats, where a dramatic increase or decrease in number of voters has taken place.