Seamless polling in West Rayalaseema
The Hindu
68.48% polling for Graduates’ constituency and 90.41% for 68,000 Teachers’s constituency recorded
The polling in the West Rayalaseema Graduates and Teachers’ constituencies in Kadapa, Kurnool and Anantapur was peaceful on Monday except for allegations of non-graduates having voted for the Graduates’ constituency and political parties alleging distribution of money.
The final voting percentage at 8 p.m. was put at 68.48% of the 3.3 lakh voters in the Graduates constituency and 90.41% out of the 68,000 voters in the Teachers’ constituency in all the six districts put together.
Anantapur District Collector Nagalakshmi Selvarajan, who is the returning officer for the MLC elections, monitored the polling process from the control room on the Collectorate premises along with Superintendent of Police Fakkeerappa Kaginelli. At the same time, Kurnool Collector P. Koteswara Rao and SP Siddharth Kaushal oversaw the process from Kurnool.
The voting pace was tardy with only 50% polling recorded by 1 p.m. in Graduates’ constituency and was a little higher in the Teachers’ constituency.
Polling queue lines at the Mandal headquarters were very short and the preferential voting process took some time since 49 candidates were in the contesting in the Graduates constituency and most of the voters said they found it tiring to identify their candidate of choice and mark all the preferences.
Many had marked only 4 to 10 references, but one said that he had marked all 49. The final report of the observers will be given tomorrow on the percentage and polling process and the jumbo boxes shifted to JNTU Anantapur for Counting on March 16.