A total of 833 candidates from 61 political parties, including Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel of the Bharatiya Janata Party, are contesting the polls in these assembly segments spread across Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Gandhinagar and other districts.
TMC claimed that the new instructions were made with a "mala fide intention to benefit the candidates of Bharatiya Janata Party".
More than 10,000 security personnel, returning officers, and other support staff will oversee the counting of votes for the Himachal Pradesh assembly polls on Thursday.
About 54 per cent of 1.03 crore electors cast their votes on Thursday in 48 constituencies that went to polls in the third phase of the Bihar Assembly elections which passed of by and large peacefully.
The Congress on Wednesday demanded a thorough probe into 'discrepancies' found in some Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) during the counting of votes of the Haryana assembly polls and demanded that such EVMs should be sealed and secured pending the inquiry.
Spread over 10 districts, polling in these constituencies will be held from 7 am till 6 pm on Thursday.
Rai also asserted that the Congress will win the upcoming Assembly elections in all five states.
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.
Gujarat State Election Commission on Wednesday introduced mascots 'Shri Mat' and 'Shri Mati' to create awareness among male and female voters to exercise their right in a free and just manner in the upcoming assembly elections.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna on Wednesday won the Sitarganj assembly seat by a record margin of 39,954 votes over his nearest Bharatiya Janata Party rival to retain the top post. The victory margin is the highest in all the assembly elections in Uttarakhand so far, officials said
It was a protest which held a mirror to the government of a state taking pride in its commitment to democracy, gender equality and social indices.One person, who in his employed days had known governments and political parties at close quarters, told me that public perception of how the Kerala government handled the ASHA workers' strike had been terrible, reports Shyam G Menon.
Several pollsters have predicted that the Congress may have an edge in Karnataka, which is BJP's southern citadel, in a hung assembly with a couple of them even projecting that the grand old party may get a majority on its own.
Poll preparations for Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Delhi have begun, and the preliminary conference of chief electoral officers of these states will be held in Delhi in the first week of June.
Any decision to include "non-locals" in electoral rolls in Jammu and Kashmir is unacceptable and would be contested by all means, including in court, Nation Conference president Farooq Abdullah said on Monday after a meeting of nine parties over the issue.
Sisodia's arrest, one of the high-profile actions against an opposition leader, came after that of Satyendar Jain, Delhi's then health minister, in June last year.
Raising questions about the impartiality of the Election Commission ahead of Lok Sabha polls, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi said on Wednesday the EC should prove by its deeds that it was a neutral body.
There was no move to advance elections to the assembly in Kerala which would be held in the mid-May next year, Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi said on Tuesday.
As Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pitches for early assembly polls in Delhi, experts on Sunday said the city government may have to write to the Election Commission giving reasons behind the demand. The term of the Delhi assembly ends on February 23 next year and the polls are expected to be held sometime early February.
The full bench of the Election Commission will visit West Bengal on Thursday to oversee the poll preparedness for the last three phases of the assembly polls. Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi and the other two Election Commissioners V.S. Sampath and HS Brahma will arrive in Kolkata in the morning and hold meeting with the representatives of the political parties.
Nearly 70 per cent polling was recorded in the Uttarakhand assembly elections, which sealed the fate of 788 candidates including Chief Minister B C Khanduri and state Congress president Yashpal Arya.
The Communist Party of India-Marxist on Saturday accused the Election Commission of being indifferent to the violation of the model code of conduct by the Trinamool Congress and said it might seek legal recourse.
The sixth round of Uttar Pradesh assembly polls will see voting for 57 seats on Thursday sealing the fate of political heavyweights such as Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the Congress' Ajay Kumar Lallu and Samajwadi Party's Swami Prasad Maurya.
Biennial elections to the legislative councils in Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh from 42 local authorities' constituencies will be held on December 10, the Election Commission announced on Tuesday.
Omar Abdullah will have to negotiate at every step with the lieutenant governor's office and the Modi government at the Centre.
Real time monitoring of all the 23,000 booths where polling will take place on Monday will ensure a free and fair election, Gujarat Chief Electoral Officer Anita Karwal tells Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore.
In a state, where there is no industry worth naming and no economy other than government offices, the number of crorepatis is surprisingly high.
The Election Commission has declined permission for use of a government college ground near Panaji as the venue for a Congress rally to be addressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The people of West Bengal have lost faith in the state police and therefore their demand for deployment of central forces, Nayak said.
The poll panel also referred to the instances of "inappropriate vocabulary and language" used during the ongoing campaign by persons, "in particular, by those invested with the statutory status of star campaigner".
While the Congress top brass has declined the invitation to the January 22 consecration ceremony at Ayodhya's Ram temple, the party's Uttar Pradesh unit plans to go ahead with its own event a week earlier in the holy town.
Chief Electoral Officer M N Vidyashankar said on Sunday an average of 66 per cent polling was registered in the first phase of elections in the segments spread over 11 districts. This is higher than the 65.07 per cent average polled in the 224 assembly segments in 2004 polls.
The election commission on Thursday said it had decided to delete the names of all those against whom non-bailable warrants are pending for over six months from the voters list.\n
As leaders in both the BJP and Congress concede, neither has within their parties a leader to match Arvind Kejriwal's charisma in Delhi.
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