StatesAndhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh votes today for mandal and zilla parishads after a two-day delay
About 2.61 crore rural voters can cast their ballots from 7 am to 5 pm in the MPTC and ZPTC elections, which were pushed back from 3 November. Counting is on Saturday.
Key points
- Polling for mandal and zilla parishad seats runs from 7 am to 5 pm on Thursday.
- 659 ZPTC and 9,829 MPTC constituencies were listed for election.
- Votes will be counted on Saturday, 7 November, with any repoll on Friday.
Rural Andhra Pradesh goes to the polls on Thursday to elect members of its mandal and zilla parishads, two days later than first planned. Voting in the Mandal Parishad Territorial Constituency (MPTC) and Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituency (ZPTC) elections runs from 7 am to 5 pm.
When State Election Commissioner Anil Chandra Punetha announced the schedule in Vijayawada on 19 October, 659 of the state’s 663 ZPTC seats and 9,829 of its 9,858 MPTC seats were listed for election. About 2.61 crore voters are eligible, and the commission set up 35,333 polling stations. It classed 9,966 of them as sensitive and 9,186 as very sensitive, with webcasting at mandal and district level. Some seats were settled before polling day, when returning officers declared unopposed winners on 27 October.
After scrutiny, 50,815 nominations were found valid, 46,045 of them for MPTC seats and 4,770 for ZPTC seats.
Why the date moved
Polling was originally fixed for 3 November. After the Supreme Court’s directions on 21 October, the commission gave candidates in four urban local bodies two more days to file nominations, which pushed municipal counting to 3 November. To avoid stretching police and election staff over two big exercises on the same day, it moved the rural vote to Thursday.
At 88 polling stations in Alluri Sitarama Raju and Polavaram districts, voting closes early, at 3 pm. Any repoll will be held on Friday, and counting begins at 8 am on Saturday, 7 November.
The run-up has been bitter. The YSR Congress Party has said its candidates were attacked when nominations opened, and filing closed amid clashes in Palnadu, Anantapur and Tirupati, and in Odisha, Naveen Patnaik wrote to Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi on Wednesday asking him to take up Andhra’s decision to hold polls in Kotia, a disputed cluster of villages on the border.