Namesakes fail to dent vote share of established candidates in western TN

Prominent candidates from both DMK and AIADMK battled against their namesakes besides fighting out against their main arch rivals in the tough electoral war. 

True to expectations, these namesakes failed to make any impact and managed to garner votes even lesser than None of the Above (NOTA) in almost all the constituencies. 

In The Nilgiris constituency, where 2G fame A Raja crushed his rival AIADMK’s M Thiyagarajan by a huge vote margin of 205,823 votes, his name sake contender with the same name, but with a different initial managed to secure just 3, 257 votes. Yet, this is among the highest vote share polled by any of the namesake candidates in the whole of Western region.   

“If there had been a close contest, then even a few hundred votes could have proved spoilsport for the original candidates. Since the DMK had won with a huge majority in almost all the constituencies, the impact of namesakes was not felt,” said a DMK functionary. 

Namesakes U Radhakrishnan and P Radhakrishnan, who were pitted against BJP candidate CP Radhakrishnan in Coimbatore Loksabha constituency, had polled 2,633 and 1,624 votes each. 

The BJP candidate however lost to CPI (M)’s PR Natarajan. Also independents KN Shanmugasundaram and V Shanmugasundaram, who battled against DMK’s K Shanmugasundaram in the Pollachi Lok Sabha constituency, managed to secure only 710 and 1,264 votes. 

Most of the namesakes tested the electoral waters in constituencies where the DMK and AIADMK had a straight contest. In the Erode constituency, MDMK candidate A Ganeshamurthi, who contested on a DMK symbol alongside his namesakes’ AC Ganeshamurthy and M Ganeshamoorthy, romped home polling 5,63,591 votes against his rival AIADMK’s G Manimaran securing 3,52,973 votes. 

Both the namesake rivals managed to get meager 1539 and 1006 votes each. AIADMK’s P Kaliappan faced his namesakes’ S Kaliappan and P Kaliappan, who bagged 1177 and 2632 votes respectively. 

Most of the name sake candidates were not into serious campaigning and were fielded mainly to confuse the voters. 

Unlike in the past, as the EVMs had photograph of the candidate alongside the party symbol, the intention of the parties didn’t materialize and namesakes couldn’t make a major cut into the vote share of the original candidate.