Rajya Sabha Election In Karnataka: Candidates, Procedure, Date

The Rajya Sabha election in Karnataka will be held on 10 June 2022. Read on to know about the candidates for the Karnataka Rajya Sabha elections and how the elections are conducted.

The Parliament of India has two houses, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. The people elect representatives to the Lok Sabha directly through a public voting system once in 5 years.

Each time the House is completely dissolved and reset. However, Rajya Sabha Members of Parliament (MPs) are elected by the state legislative assembly members. Each Rajya Sabha MP serves a 6-year term with one-third of the House retiring every two years.

Thus, the House is never completely dissolved. Let’s take a closer look at how the Rajya Sabha MPs are elected from each state.

Rajya Sabha Election In Karnataka — Ministry of Finance (GODL-India), GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons

Do All States Have Equal Representation In Rajya Sabha?

The Rajya Sabha has a sanctioned strength of 250 MPs. Of these 12 members are nominated by the President while the others are elected. All states do not have equal representation in the Rajya Sabha.

States like Nagaland, Mizoram, Goa and a few others have only one representative each. On the other hand. Uttar Pradesh has 31 MPs. Seats are allotted according to the population of each state/ union territory.

Karnataka has 12 seats in the Rajya Sabha. Of these one-third or 4 seats come up for elections every two years.

Rajya Sabha Elections In Karnataka Election Procedure

Elections are held only if the number of candidates exceeds the number of vacant seats. For example, when the Karnataka Rajya Sabha elections are held, there are 4 seats vacant. If there are only 4 nominees, elections will not be required.

However, if there are 10 nominees, elections will be held by a single transferable vote. Every nominated candidate must be supported by at least 10% of the party strength in the House or 10 Assembly members in the case of independent candidates.

Voting is not held for each seat. Instead, voting members rank each candidate in order of preference. To win a seat, the candidate must first meet the minimum vote requirement, i.e., he or she must be the first preference. The candidate with the most votes is then elected to the Rajya Sabha.

The minimum number of votes required is calculated as 1+ (total number of votes divided by the number of seats available +1)
In the case of Karnataka, the total number of votes is 224 and the number of seats that come up for elections every two years is 4.
Minimum number of votes required = 1+( 224/ (4+1)) = 45

Rajya Sabha Elections In Karnataka 2022 – Candidates

6 candidates are vying for the 4 Karnataka Rajya Sabha seats available. This includes:

Candidates	Party
Jaggesh	BJP
Nirmala Sitharaman	BJP
Lahar Singh Siroya	BJP
Jairam Ramesh	INC
Mansoor Ali Khan	INC
D Kupendra Reddy	JD(S)

Nirmala Sitharaman and Jaggesh are likely to win their seats as representatives of the BJP while Jairam Ramesh will be elected from the Congress party. After these votes are cast, neither the BJP nor the Congress will have enough votes to win the fourth seat. There are 3 candidates for this seat and hence a situation may arise wherein second and third preferential votes may need to be counted.