FirstVote: Over 20,000 voters; governance and Modi dominate

Almost 12 crore Indians will become eligible to vote in the next upcoming Lok Sabha elections, and the importance of getting them all to vote cannot be underscored.It was with this in mind that Firstpost launched Firstvote, where users could register their preferences for who would govern them in upcoming polls and also register for voter id cards if they do not have them.[caption id="attachment_1142373" align="alignleft" width="380"] Have you cast your vote yet?[/caption]The response so far has been tremendous with over 20,000 people already registering their votes.More importantly over 46,000 have registered their voter ID on our site.As far as responses are concerned, it has been overwhelming. However, we've noted that the number of male voters is over 19,000 while the female voters are only at 1106. We really hope that more women will participate in the online poll in the coming weeks.As far as voters are concerned, the biggest reason that impacts most users who voted on the site is still governance.For more than 6,000 users, governance was an important issue in deciding their vote, followed by the state of the economy which had over 4,000 users. As we have noted earlier, the issue of governance and the current state of the economy were the most important considerations for voters, with governance edging the economy in key states like Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.The stress on governance makes since given that for many of India's online population the current government has failed on the issue of governance. In fact the current economic stagnation is seen as linked to the issue of governance by many.As far as personalities are concerned, Narendra Modi remains the most talked about even on the FirstVote page. According to a recent report by BlogWorks, Narendra Modi is way ahead of the pack when it comes to online mentions.The report says that mentions of Narendra Modi have seen the highest and most consistent increase by the rate of 126 percent since January 2013. This is way higher than all other politicians in India.We asked users if the Gujarat CM and BJP's current Prime Ministerial candidate should apologise for the 2002 riots. An overwhelming majority said no.