Telangana : Municipal Polls Today

Hyderabad: Stage is set for the first municipal elections to be held on Wednesday in Telangana. Taking serious note of the growing number of cases of impersonation in the voting, the State Election Commission (SEC) has introduced a norm that even if a single incident of impersonation takes place, repolling for the entire polling booth will be ordered.

As many as 12,926 candidates are in fray for the 3,029 wards.

Over 53 lakh people will exercise their franchise in the urban local body polls. Necessary arrangements, including deployment of 50,000 polling staff to the 6,531 polling stations and adequate police forces were made in all poll-bound municipalities.

SEC Commissioner V Nagi Reddy appealed to the voters to insist for tendered vote in case their vote is cast by others. As per the Conduct of Election Rules 1961, if a person finds that someone else had cast his vote before he could, he can ask for tendered vote from the presiding officer of the polling booth.

The citizen who is seeking tendered vote should prove his identity by providing necessary documents. The voter will also have to fill in Form-15 to cast the tendered vote.

It is first time the Commission brought into force the new norm under which re- polling will be held in the entire polling booth if a tendered vote is registered and it is proved genuine in the investigation. "There will be zero tolerance on impersonation.

Even if there is a single tendered vote, the Commission will take up re-polling in the entire polling booth.

Earlier, the tendered vote was counted in the counting of votes," the official said and urged the voters to cast their vote conveniently as there will be no big queues at polling booth which will have a maximum number of 600 voters only. The polling will be held between 7 am and 5 pm on the election day.

Among the 53,50,255 voters, 26,73,994 are female voters and 357 were belonged to other category.

On a pilot basis, face recognition application has been introduced to help in real time digital authentication of voters in 10 polling stations in Kompally municipality. Candidates in 83 wards were already declared unanimous in the municipalities, the SEC official said.