Vijayapura: The voting for the dual seat of Vijayapura-Bagalkot MLC Constituency for local bodies held peacefully in the districts with no reports of any untoward incident. Since only elected members of local and urban bodies are the voters in the polls, therefore there was no long queues or rush witnessed at any polling booth. In fact in many polling booths where the total voters were only 21, the only one or two votes were polled till 10:00 am.
Meanwhile, the Gram Panchayat members were excited to vote to select their representative in the Council. Besides voting in general elections, it is the only chance they get to vote separately where they cast the vote to choose an MLC for the upper house.
The GP members said that they are happy to vote in the MLC polls. The primary reason for their happiness is the independent candidate who decided to stay in the fray and did not withdraw their nomination papers. While a total seven candidates were in fray, of them five are independent candidates. The main fight is apparently between Sunilgouda Patil of the Congress and P. H. Pujar of the BJP.
It was reported that since the BJP and Congress had given ticket to one candidate each in the election, the parties were trying to ensure an unopposed election by convincing all the independent candidates to withdraw. However, not all independent candidates withdrew their nominations which made the election inevitable.
The GP members who had come to vote, expressed gratitude to the independent candidates for staying in the fray. They said that if all the independent candidates had withdrawn and only two candidates had remained in the fray, then it would have been an unopposed election. This meant that the GP members would not have got a chance to vote for the candidate of their choice.
Meanwhile, the District Administration informed that till 2.00 pm, 57.98% voting was recorded. Total voters are 7387, of them 3543 male and 3844 female voters had the chance to vote.
A total of 411 polling booths have been set up, of them 208 in Vijayapura and 203 in Bagalkot district. Some 38 sector officials, 22 flying squad and 22 video surveillance teams have been deployed for the polling duty. A total of 80 hyper sensitive and 156 sensitive booths have been identified in both the Districts. A total of 1233 polling staff have been deployed while 30% have been kept as reserve.
For security during polling, 811 police staff in Vijayapura and 307 in Bagalkote have been deployed.
