Around 5.82 crore voters are set to elect the new 234-member assembly in the polls and on May 23 for Thanjavur and Aravakurichi constituencies.
Advertisement
Polling for 232 Assembly seats in Tamil Nadu continued at a brisk pace, with over 63 per cent of the electorate casting their votes by 3 PM.
The Election Commission on Monday said it was for the first time that it deferred polls in two Tamil Nadu constituencies following evidence of use of money power. In Madurai central constituency, the chief polling officer in a booth was replaced after she allegedly misled a visually-challenged voter to vote for a person not of his choice. Election Commission officials said it could well cross the 75.12 per cent recorded in 2011 when the polling ends at 6 pm.
The counting of votes will be held on May 19. In Kerala, Congress-led ruling UDF and CPI-M headed opposition LDF are in a neck and neck electoral fight in the state where BJP is striving hard to make a maiden entry into the assembly. So, all the Congress can be happy about at the moment is Puducherry, where exit polls have put it ahead of the ruling Rangasamy government.
Advertisement
However, the C-Voter survey stood as the only agency to predict a decisive victory for the AIADMK. NewsX-Today’s Chanakya predicted a whopping 210 (plus or minus 14) seats for the Trinamool, 70 (plus or minus nine) for the Left-Congress and 14 rpt 14 (plus or minus five) seats for the BJP. In Tamil Nadu, leaders of all major political parties were among the early voters. Nine seats could go to others. Unusually, Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa did not exude confidence on making a resounding comeback as she told journalists to wait for two days for the counting to happen. But once the results were out, PMK lost that one seat too, bringing its tally down to zero. “We alone will get absolute majority and with our partners, we will get two-thirds seats”, he said.
