Tripura registers 11 per cent voting in first two hours

Team Udayavani, Feb 18, 2018, 10:07 AM IST

Agartala: About 11 per cent of Tripura’s electorate had cast their vote within the first two hours in the state Assembly elections which began at 7am today, Additional Chief Electoral Officer Tapas Roy said. Elections are being held in 59 out of the state’s 60 Assembly constituencies. The election in Charilam constituency was postponed following the death seven days ago of CPI(M) candidate Ramendra Narayan Debbarma.

No incidents of violence had been reported from anywhere in the state, officials said. The voting process, however, got delayed in some booths of West Tripura, Khowai, Unakoti districts as election workers could not connect the EVMs or electronic voting machines, he said.

“Engineers rushed to the booths and put everything in order,” he added. BJP leader Sudip Roy Burman and ruling CPI(M) leader Krishna Majumder, both candidates from the Agartala constituency, had earlier in the day claimed that voting in a few polling stations in the state capital were held up for more than 90 minutes because of EVM glitches.

Roy refuted the claims and said all voting machines were working. State Director General of Police Akhil Kumar Shukla said security measures had been put in place across Tripura for the Assembly polls.

The BSF has been asked to keep a close vigil on the 856-km-long India-Bangladesh border in Tripura and 300 companies of central armed forces along with state armed personnel and police have been deployed across the state to ensure free and fair polls, he added.

Tripura Chief Electoral Officer Sriram Taranikanti said the Election Commission has appointed police observers, general observers and expenditure observers to oversee the entire poll process.