An Assembly constituency, often shortened to AC, or called a Vidhan Sabha seat, is a geographic area that elects one member to a state’s Legislative Assembly.
It is the basic unit of Indian state elections. Results, candidate lists, turnout figures and the electoral roll itself are all organised around it.
One constituency, one MLA
Each Assembly constituency returns exactly one Member of the Legislative Assembly, and the candidate with the most votes wins it.
You are enrolled in precisely one, determined by where you are ordinarily resident. That is the only ballot you can cast, which is why moving house requires updating the roll; your old constituency is no longer yours.
How it fits with parliamentary constituencies
The two are nested. A parliamentary constituency, which elects an MP to the Lok Sabha, contains several complete Assembly constituencies; those are called its Assembly segments.
So you sit inside both at once: one Assembly constituency and one parliamentary constituency. Two representatives, two different elections, two different houses. See MLA vs MP.
This nesting is why Lok Sabha results are often reported “by Assembly segment”; it shows how a parliamentary seat broke down across the smaller units inside it.
Reserved constituencies
Some Assembly constituencies are reserved for candidates from Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. In a reserved seat, only candidates from that category may contest.
An important detail that is widely misunderstood: reservation applies to who may stand, not to who may vote. Every registered elector in a reserved constituency votes normally. The reservation constrains the candidate list.
You will see these marked (SC) or (ST) after the constituency name in official results.
Why boundaries change
Constituencies are drawn to hold roughly comparable populations, so that votes carry roughly comparable weight. Populations shift, so boundaries are periodically redrawn: a process called delimitation, carried out by a Delimitation Commission.
When it happens, areas move between constituencies, seats are created or merged, and reservation status can change. A voter who has not moved house can find themselves in a differently named constituency, with a different sitting MLA and a different polling station.
This is one of the quieter reasons to re-check your entry before an election rather than assume nothing has changed.
Reading a constituency result
Official results for a constituency give you the candidates, their parties, votes polled for each, NOTA votes, the winner, and the margin.
Two things worth noticing. The winner often has well under half the votes, because first-past-the-post needs only the largest share. And the margin matters more than the headline: a seat won by a few hundred votes is a different political fact from one won by fifty thousand, even though both count as one seat.
To find your own constituency, its current representative and its past results, use the constituency directory on the main India वोट Kar site.
Find your constituency, current representative and past results →
