‘Excited To Vote’: Elderly Among First Voters At Booths Across Noida During LS Polls

Lok Sabha Elections 2024: Eledery citizens were among the first to vote during Phase 2 of polls in Noida in the Gautam Buddha Nagar constituency.

An early voter in Noida said that the entire process hardly took 10 minutes.

Source : PTI

Senior citizens took the lead on voting during the Lok Sabha elections’s second phase in Noida in the Gautam Buddha Nagar constituency on Friday. According to a PTI report, due to the short queues, several booths reported brisk voting in the first hour.

District Magistrate Manish Kumar Verma, who is also the District Election Officer also joined the early voters. He told PTI that he was “excited to vote” and urged “the residents to exercise their right and cast votes in large numbers”. “I hope this time we will have better voter turnout than the last time," Verma said after casting his vote at Cambridge School in Sector 27.

Another voter, Ashok Verma, 66, who was an early voter in Noida, said, that the entire process hardly took 10 minutes and said it was ”a good experience”.

A total of 15 candidates are in the fray for the Gautam Buddha Nagar seat, with over 26.75 lakh people eligible to decide their fate.

A couple Manoj and Sujata, brought their 8-year-old son Sharav to the polling booth, “to show him the polling process so that he, too, could participate in voting in future”, reported PTI. 

The residents' welfare association (RWA) in Sector 15A had made arrangements for electric vehicles to ferry voters to and from the polling station. 

In the Gautam Buddh Nagar constituency, there are assembly segments of Noida, Dadri, Jewar, Khurja and Sikandrabad. Of these, Sikandrabad and Khujra although falls geographically in the adjoining Bulandshahr district are part of the Gautam Buddh Nagar constituency. It has  26.75 lakh eligible voters this year.

Around 20,000 personnel are on polling duty to facilitate the process for the voters in the constituency, of the personnel on poll duty, around 11,000 are from security, including police, paramilitary, civil force,  and home guards, while about 9,000 are administrative staff and officers deployed at voting booths and stations.

The constituency has consistently recorded voter turnout lower than the national average of 67.40 per cent in 2019, 66 per cent in 2014 and 58 per cent in 2009, PTI reported, citing data.