Hyderabad: Ahead of the Telangana assembly election results, Chief Electoral Officer Vikas Raj has unveiled the vote counting process and the timing. He said that the final results are set to be revealed only by 5 pm on Sunday.
Citing the reason behind the delay, he said that there are a lot of candidates running in some areas, and in a few places, a ton of people turned up to vote.
The officials in charge will kick off the vote-counting process at 8 am on Sunday, starting with the postal ballots. After that, they’ll move on to counting the votes from the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) starting at 8:30 am. If the counting of postal ballots takes longer than 8:30 am, they’ll count both postal and EVM votes at the same time.
In the six segments, each having around 500 polling stations, the final Telangana election results might be out between 4 pm and 5 pm.
A total of 1,766 tables at 49 counting centers in the state will be used for counting. Among these, 131 tables are for counting postal ballots, and votes for each area will be tallied at 14 tables.
In places where a lot of people voted or where there are many polling stations, they’ll count the votes at 28 tables, according to Chief Electoral Officer Vikas Raj, who shared this info on Friday.
For security, they’ve got a three-tier setup at strongrooms where they keep the EVMs safe. Vikas Raj mentioned that in some places, voting continued until 9:30 pm on Thursday. People who made it to the polling station by 5 pm were still allowed to cast their votes.
Vikas Raj also talked about exit polls ahead of the Telangana election results. He said they were allowed to be published just half an hour after voting ended, following the guidelines of the Election Commission of India (ECI). Vikas Raj assured everyone that the elections went smoothly across the state, and there’s no need for re-polling at any station.
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