Campaigning for the fifth phase ended on Friday evening, and all necessary arrangements have been completed, state Chief Election Officer Ajay Kumar Shukla said in Lucknow on Saturday.
AI implementation enabler Staqu will deploy its proprietary video analytics system JARVIS to count votes directly from the camera by monitoring the electronic voting machines screens at the counting centre.
Sporadic incidents of violence were reported from various places that went to polls on Saturday during the first phase of the West Bengal assembly election, even as the overall poll situation was largely peaceful with 79.79 per cent turnout recorded till the end of voting, an official said.
How many parties contested the first Lok Sabha election?
The BJP secured a runaway victory in the Municipal Board elections in Assam, pocketing 72 civic bodies out of 80. The Congress, the principal opposition party of the state, could not even win a single civic body.
Political parties were bracing for the assembly election results on Thursday in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and politically volatile Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur, sending out feelers for possible post-poll tie-ups.
Firing a fresh salvo at the Bharatiya Janata Party which had accused the Shiv Sena of paying only lip service to the cause of Hindutva, the latter's member of Parliament Sanjay Raut on Tuesday claimed that the Sena was the first party in the country to contest an election on the Hindutva plank.
Guidelines have been issued by the Commission for safe conduct of the electoral exercise in the midst of the raging COVID-19 pandemic. These guidelines include lowering the maximum number of voters for a polling booth from 1,600 to 1,000, staggering the polling hours and extending postal ballot facility to those above 80.
Total 171 votes were cast in a booth in Assam's Dima Hasao district, even though 90 people were eligible to exercise their franchise, officials said on Monday, revealing a massive irregularity.
The announcement came days after it issued a formal direction that VVPAT will be used at polling stations in all future elections where polls are held using EVMs.
As round one of the seven-phase Lok Sabha election began in 91 constituencies across the length and breadth of India, from the hills of Kashmir to the islands of Andaman and Nicobar, reports of unrest and irregularities cast shadows over the world's biggest poll process.
The commission issued letter of intent to ECIL and BEL -- both PSUs -- on Friday, two days after the Union Cabinet cleared its proposal to buy 16,15000 voter verifiable paper audit trail units at an estimated cost of Rs 3,173.47 crore.
Bihar Chief Electoral Officer H R Srinivasa said the Election Commission has established a three-tier security system for strong rooms (housing the electronic voting machines) and the counting centres. The inner core is being guarded by the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), then there is the Bihar Military Police (BMP) and then the district police, he told reporters.
The measures include an information search prompt with the Election Commission of India (@ECISVEEP) and State Election Commissions to provide reliable information around the elections, a custom emoji to encourage participation, a series of pre-bunks and debunks to tackle election-related misinformation, and a youth discussion series titled #DemocracyAdda aimed at voter literacy and civic participation among young Indians for the upcoming elections.
Modi targeted Congress's president-elect Rahul Gandhi, saying he was born with a "golden spoon" and has not seen poverty.
The voter turnout in DUSU polls on Thursday was recorded at 39.90 per cent, over four percentage points down from the last year.
Living up to the party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's promise to give 40 per cent of the tickets to women candidates, the Congress fielded 148 of them, of which only one -- Congress Legislature leader Aradhana Mishra Mona -- secured victory.
In a setback to the main opposition Samajwadi Party, the BJP wrested both Rampur and Azamgarh Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.
The chief minister has lost her cool twice in the last few weeks over people chanting 'Jai Sri Ram' at some places in the state while her motorcade was passing through.
The EC received complaints from five places that EVMs were connecting to external devices via bluetooth, but after inquiry, it was found that there was 'no substance' in the complaints.
The final phase saw voting in all 13 seats of Punjab and an equal number of seats in Uttar Pradesh, nine in West Bengal, eight seats each in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, four in Himachal Pradesh, three in Jharkhand and the lone seat Chandigarh.
The poll panel had ordered for 67,000 additional paper trail units in 2015, out of which 33,500 have been supplied, according to the law ministry.
After barring Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma from campaigning in the assembly polls for 48 hours, the Election Commission has also transferred his brother and Goalpara Superintendent of Police Sushanta Biswa Sarma from the district.
Rediff.com's Bikash Mohapatra, who is in the US to cover the presidential election, finds out that the American voter does not really trust the electronic voting machine.
7,06,252 people or 1.7 per cent of the voters opted for the option whereby they preferred not to vote for any candidate while exercising their democratic right.
'I know people will say I am raising this issue because I have lost. There have been a lot of complaints about the electronic voting machines. There is a view that the machines were defective. 'When advanced countries like Japan and the US have discarded the use of these machines and gone back to using ballot papers, the Election Commission should take a fresh look at this,' former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot tells Anita Katyal.
In the video, Scindia is heard saying, "My people of Dabra, raise your hand and make your fist to convince (state chief minister) Shivraj Singh and me, make us believe that you will press the 'hand' button on November 3."
The apex court said that a debate on polls reforms can only take place after the election process in the state is over.
Seventy-one parliamentary constituencies spread across nine states voted in the fourth phase of Lok Sabha elections.
Allaying all doubts on the possibility of Electronic Voting Machine tampering, Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla on Tuesday said the machines used in India are stand-alone machines and cannot be manipulated.
This time however, the poll panel did not share the overall polling percentage at its briefing.
India has provided 1,935 electronic voting machines to Bhutan for the country's second national elections to be held on Saturday.
Banerjee also alleged that the BJP is manipulating electronic voting machines to increase its vote share.
He also said the Bihar chief electoral officer has already responded to everything. The EC held four press conferences on counting day on November 10 to respond to various aspects of the process, Arora pointed out.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said if the Congress had formed an alliance with the Janata Dal-Secular before the election, the results would have been different.
When almost the entire political class was engrossed in the Bihar polls, the Congress shahzada was holidaying in a hill station. As the Bihar contest and other by-elections have shown, a large number of states have become Congress-mukt, fulfilling the Hindutva brigade's dream, notes Amulya Ganguli.
A voter turnout of 72.14 per cent was recorded in Assam till 5 pm on Saturday in the first phase of assembly elections in the state, the Election Commission said.
They said this was preliminary voter turnout and the final figure may cross 80 per cent as electoral fate of 301 candidates were locked in EVMs which will be opened on March 10 for counting.
Former Chief Election Commissioner T S Krishnamurthy has pitched for single-phase elections and substantially curtailing public campaigning time in future polls.
The clearance to the proposal of "procurement of VVPAT units" was given by the Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi after a brief discussion. The EC has sought Rs 3,174 crore in all for procuring over 16 lakh paper trail machines to cover all polling stations in the country.
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