Brisk polling is on in Gujarat. Voting is being held in 89 seats of Saurashtra and South Gujarat regions. – Over 1,74,000 police personnel have been deployed with security apparatus on highest alert to ensure smooth conduct of the voting process today.
In all 977 candidates are in the fray in this phase with Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, who is contesting from Rajkot (West), Congress’ Shaktisinh Gohil (Mandvi) and Paresh Dhanani (Amreli) being the prominent candidates.
About 2.12 crore voters are expected to exercise their franchise today.
For the first time, the Election Commission is deploying the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines in all the 50,128 polling stations in the state to “inject greater transparency and credibility” to the voting process. In this phase, VVPAT machines have been deployed at over 24,600 polling booths.
The sequence of candidates’ names is in alphabetical order, first for the national and state recognised parties, followed by other state registered parties, and then by independents.There is some complaint about EVMs.
