New Delhi: Counting of votes is underway in Haryana for the municipal elections for 18 municipal councils and 28 municipalities for which polling was conducted on June 19. 185 candidates across 456 wards of the 18 municipal councils are in the fray for the post of President. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is contesting the election in an alliance with Dushyant-Chuatala led Jannayak Janta Party which has the main contest with the Congress party in this election. Many Congress members have entered the fray as Independents.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was the new entrant in the civic polls which is testing the waters ahead of the 2024 Assembly polls in Haryana. In the last Haryana Assembly elections in 2019, the Arvind Kejriwal-led party had contested 46 seats of the 90-member Assembly but had to experience a humiliating defeat with just 0.48 percent vote share.
As per State Election Commissioner Dhanpat Singh, of the 185 candidates that are in the fray, 100 are women while 85 are men.
A total of 15 councillors have been elected unanimously out of 456 wards, while 1,797 candidates were contesting in the remaining 441 wards.
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There were 12.6 lakh voters in 18 municipal councils, out of which 663,870 were men, 596,095 women, and 35 transgenders, Singh said.
Of the total 1,290 polling booths that were set up for the civic elections, 289 polling stations were marked as sensitive while 235 as hyper-sensitive. Minor skirmishes and snags in the electronic voting machine (EVM) were reported on the day of polling, officials had said, news agency IANS had reported.