Sections still being placed.
These five sections were pulled off the home page during the post-result information-architecture pass. They remain wired to the same data and render correctly — parked here while the final home/analysis split is worked out. Some will return to home or move into /analysis; the rest may be retired.
Where the 234 seats came from.
Every 2026 winner was either a hold from the alliance that won that seat in 2021, or a flip. The grid below counts both — read across each row to see where a 2021 alliance's seats went; read down a column to see where each 2026 bloc's seats came from. The single biggest flow: 78 seats moved from DMK-led SPA to TVK (Vijay).
| ↓ from 2021 | → TVK | → NDA | → SPA | → OTHER | 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NDA | 30 | 25 | 20 | · | 75 |
| SPA | 78 | 28 | 53 | · | 159 |
| 2026 total | 108 | 53 | 73 | 0 | 234 |
Diagonal cells = held; off-diagonal = flipped. SPA contested with the same 2021 partners; NDA reabsorbed BJP+PMK in 2024 and contested as a single bloc; TVK and NTK contested solo. Read against the 2021 baseline on the /analysis page.
Where the cleansed roll changed the outcome.
The Special Intensive Revision struck 74 lakh namesfrom Tamil Nadu's rolls before this election. Did that cleansing shape the result? Sort the 234 ACs into five buckets by how heavily their rolls were cleaned, then look at who won in each bucket. The pattern is unmistakable.
The headline contrastIn ACs with the lightest SIR cleanup, TVK won 26% of seats. In ACs with the heaviest cleanup, TVK won 77%.
A 2.9× swing toward the new party in places where the rolls were most aggressively shrunk. Whether SIR caused the swing or merely correlated with it, the gradient is real.
The gradient.
SIR-strike % = (electors-2021 − electors-2026) / electors-2021. ACs with negative strike (added more names than removed) sit in quintile 1. The 47 ACs with the heaviest cleanup gave TVK 36 of those seats — a 77% strike rate.
Where the people who didn't vote went.
2021's headline number was the non-voter — 172.55 lakh Tamilians stayed home, more than the entire winning alliance's vote. Five years later, after the Special Intensive Revision, that pool has collapsed to 73.83 lakh — a 57% drop. Some of that is real turnout growth; much of it is a smaller denominator after 74 lakh names were struck. But did the absentees still decide anything?
The cleanest finding from the apathy dataIn ACs where turnout grew the LEAST since 2021, TVK won 13% of seats. Where it grew the MOST, TVK won 83%.
A 6.4× swing. Wherever new voters showed up — or absent voters were removed via SIR — TVK won. Almost every story this year traces back to the cleansed roll meeting a high-turnout enthusiasm wave.
The other gradient.
Turnout shift = VTR 2026 − VTR 2021, in percentage points. Every AC saw turnout go up — the smallest gain was +3.6pp, the largest +30pp. The TVK column climbs from 6 in the lowest quintile to 39 in the highest.
Won by a sliver, decided by the rest.
The top row, Tiruppattur (AC 185), was decided by a one-vote margin while 57,746 registered voters stayed home. The least apathetic outcomes — places like Edappadi (AC 86) where EPS won by 98,110 with only ~16k no-shows — appear at the opposite extreme. Across 234 seats, the median ratio was ~ a few hundred.
Counting day, ten ways.
Each card replays a single AC the way Returning Officers tabulated it: cumulative votes per candidate per round. Stalin's Kolathur, Vijay's Perambur, EPS's Edappadi, Seeman's Karaikudi, the rally-crush AC of Karur, and the closest seat in the state — Tiruppattur, won by a single vote, called at 2 AM.
PERAMBUR
Vijay's primary seat — TVK debut win
KOLATHUR
CM Stalin's seat — lost to TVK
ROYAPURAM
DMK heartland — TVK flip
CHEPAUK-THIRUVALLIKENI
Deputy CM Udhayanidhi held
MYLAPORE
Central Chennai — TVK pickup
EDAPPADI
Leader of Opposition EPS — biggest blowout in TN
KARUR
Site of Sept 2025 rally crush — AIADMK held
TIRUCHIRAPPALLI EAST
Vijay's second seat — won both
KARAIKUDI
Seeman (NTK) lost his own seat
TIRUPPATTUR
Closest seat in TN — won by 1 vote, declared 2 AM
The vote that wasn't.
Winners and margins dominate election coverage. But in 2021, non-voters outnumbered the winner's margin in nearly nine of every ten constituencies. The people who didn't vote exerted more weight than the candidates who won. This is their accounting — and the scaffolding we'll use to measure the 2026 surge against, once counting is done.
In Thiyagarayanagar, more than 1,09,000 people stayed home in 2021. The winner came in by 137 votes.
| AC | Name | Non-voters | Winner's margin | Ratio | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 | Thiyagarayanagar | 1,08,562 | 137 | 792.4× | DMK |
| 222 | Tenkasi | 81,621 | 370 | 220.6× | INC |
| 100 | Modakkurichi | 59,781 | 281 | 212.7× | BJP |
| 85 | Mettur | 72,775 | 656 | 110.9× | PMK |
| 122 | Kinathukadavu | 96,606 | 1,095 | 88.2× | ADMK |
| 40 | Katpadi | 65,438 | 746 | 87.7× | DMK |
| 53 | Krishnagiri | 57,967 | 794 | 73.0× | ADMK |
| 152 | Vriddhachalam | 58,698 | 862 | 68.1× | INC |
| 153 | Neyveli | 56,920 | 977 | 58.3× | DMK |
| 120 | Coimbatore (South) | 1,00,244 | 1,728 | 58.0× | BJP |
Ratio = 2021 non-voters ÷ winner's 2021 margin. On counting day we will compute this for 2026 alongside — in constituencies where this ratio exceeds one, voter abstention is a larger force than the contest itself.
Non-voters = registered electors minus votes cast. 2021 margin = the winner's vote total minus the runner-up's. 2026 non-voter counts here are from the provisional ECINET turnout at 21:18 IST on 23 April 2026 — the final ECI figures typically revise this number downward by 1–2 percentage points (more voters will be counted). The 2026 winner-margin column, and the updated apathy ratio, arrive with counting day.