With 214,109,367 registered voters in 2016, the U.S. presidential election is a pretty big affair. Still, despite that impressive figure, it doesn’t represent the world’s largest exercise in democracy, an honor that falls to India. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance which maintains records of registered voters and turnout in elections across the world, 910.5 million people in India were registered to vote when the country hit the polls last year. Given the sheer number of voters and the complexity that the process entails, it is divided into seven phases lasting six weeks, spread out across the country’s 20 states and union territories with 91 constituencies in total. The drawn-out nature of the Indian election is also in place to facilitate the large number of officials required, as well as to enact security and safeguard the integrity of the contest. That is pretty understandable given that the number of registered voters in India is nearly three times the size of the U.S. population.
Elsewhere, Indonesia has the world’s third-largest election and it is not far off the U.S. in scale. In 2019, 192.9 million Indonesians were registered to vote, more than half of whom were aged 40 or under. Like India, Indonesia’s contest is extremely complex, spread out across 17,000 islands with 809,500 polling stations and 250,000 candidates battling for 20,538 legislative seats. Unlike India, however, the challenging election takes place within one day and everything is generally completed over a six-hour period. Split into two rounds, the Brazilian election follows Indonesia for scale and nearly 147 million people were registered to vote when Jair Bolsonaro won the most recent contest in October 2018. As well as the presidential contest, it involved more than 1,600 posts in total with new governors elected in all 27 states, along with 54 senators. Elsewhere, Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan hold huge elections that involve at least 100 million registered voters.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
