Counting for Gujarat local polls from 9 am, results of urban women candidates first

Gandhinagar

The much awaited counting of votes for local body polls in the six municipal corporations, 56 municipalities, 31 district and 230 taluka panchayats will be done tomorrow during which as per the new rules the results of women candidates of the two urban bodies will be declared first.

All the six municipal corporation and most of the other local body seats were won by BJP in the last elections. Party vice president I K Jadeja has expressed confidence of comfortable victory while the leader of opposition Shankersinh Vaghela has claimed that the results would bring tremors for the ruling party with Congress winning more than 80 percent seats.

State Election Commissioner Varesh Sinha said that all the preparations for counting have been done.

Deputy Election Commissioner at the State Election Commission, Mr A Ramanuj today said that the counting across all the centers will begin at 9am in the morning. ‘As per the modified rules the results of the women candidates in the municipal corporations and municipalities will be declared first. Of the two reserved women seats of the total four in each ward of the two urban local bodies, the result of the reserved women seat which is further reserved for SC/ST/OBC women candidates will be made public first. The results of the non women seats would be declared later,’ he said.

‘As district and taluka panchayats have one ward one seat system the women first thing won’t apply there. For the lesser number of seat in each ward of the rural bodies their results were likely to come earlier. However all the results are expected to come latest by 12 to one pm,’ he said.

‘The EVMs make the counting easy and it in fact takes only 20 to 25 minutes per machine to count the votes but the other procedures and compilation etc take time before formal declaration of the results,’ he said adding that adequate security arrangements have been made for the counting.

A total of 1856 candidates are in the fray for 570 seats across the six municipal bodies of Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot, Jamnagar, Bhavnagar of which 570 were from the BJP, 561 from Congress, 351 others and 374 independents. Average around 48 percent voting from the around 95 lakh voters had taken place in the first phase polls for these urban bodies in which many high profile voters including BJP national president Amit Shah, Senior party leader L K Advani, Karnataka Governor Vajubhai Vala had also exercised their franchise.

Maximum 56.96% voting had taken place in Jamnagar while the minimum 39.64% was in Surat The largest municipal body of Ahmedabad ie AMC had seen 46.07 % voting while that in Vadodara was 48%.Voting percentage for Bhavnagar and Rajkot was 47.44 and 49.53 respectively. Two seats one each in Surat and Vadodara have been won by the ruling BJP unopposed.

In the second phase polls held on November 29, there were a total of 19724 candidates in the fray. An average over 62% of the 2.60 crore voters cast their votes on 33286 booths. For the municipalities there were around 36.5 lakh while for district and taluka panchayats there were around 2.23 lakh total voters,

An increase of 0.7 to 2 percent has been recorded in the polling for taluka and district panchayats and municipalities this time round which the official polling figure for the three bodies recorded at 63.98, 65 and 62% respectively. 27 candidates for the municipalities have been elected unopposed while 7 and 54 candidates for district and taluka panchayats respectively have won unopposed.

– DeshGujarat