In 2014 Lok Sabha (LS) elections, when popular actor Hema Malini was contesting from Mathura constituency, she was up against another Hema Malini. In 2019, when Rahul Gandhi was contesting from Wayanad constituency, he was against one other Rahul Gandhi, and another Raghul Gandhi. How do these ‘Dummy’ candidates affect election results? We look at examples from the 2023 Karnataka Assembly Elections. In the 2014 Lok Sabha (LS) elections, when popular actor Hema Malini was contesting from the Mathura constituency, she was up against another Hema Malini. In 2019, when Rahul Gandhi was contesting from the Wayanad constituency, he was against another Rahul Gandhi and one more Raghul Gandhi In 2023, when H.D. Revanna, a legislator of Janata Dal (Secular) from Karnataka contested from Holenarasipur constituency, he was up against another H.D. Revanna from Purvanchal Mahapanchayat party. What’s in the name? One might ask. Winning an election is the ultimate goal of a political party. Terming this as an ‘election tradecraft’, political parties try every trick in the book to end up on the winning side. While the traditional electoral tradecraft focussed on leveraging the existing strength to win the elections, the trend from the past few years has been to weaken the opposition. Over the past few years, a new approach emerged to confuse voters by fielding a candidate with a similar name as that of the opponent. In various instances throughout the history of Indian elections, political parties have put forth candidates with identical names in an effort to mislead voters. These generally “identical” candidates are not a coincidence; they are part of an age-old political trick to deceive voters who might inadvertently choose the wrong candidate once they enter the voting booth. Political parties frequently look for namesakes and then support their election expenses in order to oppose them in constituencies where there is a close contest, and a slight margin of votes could swing the elections. While the impact of these ‘identical’ candidates varies, they cause significant damage to voting share in constituencies with a close contest. In this story, we look at such instances from the recently concluded 2023 Karnataka Assembly elections, and their potential impact on the results. Methodology followed to identify candidates with similar names The matching algorithm used is “Sequence Matcher” which works by analysing the individual elements of the sequences and finding the longest common subsequence. This means it looks for the longest sequence of elements that appear in the same order in both sequences. By finding this common subsequence, we can determine how similar the two sequences are. This algorithm returns a value between 0 and 1, where 0 means no similarity and 1 means an exact match. The higher the ratio, the more similar the sequences are. We used the above concept, and implemented it at every constituency level to find the similarity of names for the candidates. Here are some examples that we found: 1st Instance – (Higher match scores, possible swing of electoral result): This is from the Jayanagar constituency. After what seemed like an endless high-voltage drama in the constituency, BJP candidate C.K. Ramamurthy defeated incumbent Congress MLA Sowmya Reddy by a narrow margin of 16 votes. Earlier, Sowmya Reddy was alleged to be declared as the winner with 160 vote majority, but after several recounts of postal ballots, C.K. Ramamurthy emerged as the winner. The final update on the website of the Election Commission of India (ECI) shows that Ramamurthy received 57,797 votes (including 500 postal votes) against Reddy’s 57,781 votes (including 190 postal votes). Below is the image of the final result as published by the ECI. If we carefully observe, there are two independent candidates with similar names to that of those from the major parties. ‘Sowmya Reddy’ has ‘Sowmya A Reddy’ as a similar name candidate, while ‘C K Ramamurthy’ had ‘B Ramamurthy’. The match scores as per our methodology for the above candidates are 92% and 85% respectively. Assuming that these dummy candidates did not fight the elections, and their share is completely added to the candidates from BJP and INC, the new total tally of votes for Sowmya Reddy would be 58101 votes (sum of 57781 & 320), whereas the same for C K Ramamurthy would be 58000 votes (sum of 57797 & 203). Clearly, Sowmya Reddy from INC could have emerged as a winner with a margin of 101 votes. This is a case of similar-name candidates swinging the election result. 2nd instance – (Higher match scores, no swing in electoral result, but impact on victory margin) This is the case of the Malur constituency.