Out of the total 543 Parliamentary seats, elections were held in 542 constituencies as the Election Commission had cancelled polls to the Vellore seat in Tamil Nadu on the grounds of excessive use of money power. The fresh date for elections in Vellore is yet to be announced.
Counting will also take place for four state assemblies of Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. The results are expected only by late evening due to tallying of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail slips with the Electronic Voting Machines
All necessary arrangements are in place for counting of votes tomorrow, for the Lok Sabha elections, in which over eight thousand candidates are in the fray for 542 seats.
This is the first time that results of voting machines will be matched with slips generated by paper trail machines. The exercise will take place in five polling stations selected at random per Assembly segment. This effectively means the EVM-VVPAT matching will take place in 20,600 out of nearly 10.3 lakh polling stations.
As per procedure, postal ballots would be the first to be counted.
Service voters stood at 18 lakh. Out of 18 lakh registered voters, 16.49 lakh have already sent their postal ballots to their respective returning officers.
Meanwhile, a 24- hour EVM Control Room has been set up at Nirvachan Sadan in New Delhi to monitor complaints relating to polled EVMs. The Control Room contact number is 011-23052123.
