CHENNAI: The second phase of elections to rural local bodies on Monday ended mostly on a peaceful note, except for the murder of a person at Ottapidaram near a polling station over a poll-related issue.
During the second phase of elections, 77.73 per cent of voters exercised their franchise while polling percentage in 30 booths where re-poll was held stood at 72.70. In the first phase of polls on December 27, 76.19 per cent votes were polled. Besides, re-poll will take place in a few more booths on January 1.
When a batch of petitions filed by the DMK and its allies came up for hearing before the Madras High Court on Monday, the State Election Commission (SEC) informed the court that arrangements were already made for round-the-clock surveillance at the strong rooms using CCTV cameras and counting will be videographed as per rules.
‘No fresh orders’
The court said since it was evident from the circular issued by the SEC for preventing irregularities during counting, there was no need for passing fresh orders and disposed of the petitions. The court also dismissed as not maintainable a petition from Satta Panchayat Iyakkam seeking directions to the SEC for deferring the announcement of results of the two phases of the elections until the completion of elections to urban local bodies.
Meanwhile, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court directed the SEC to produce copies of CCTV footage from all counting centres in the 13 districts within its jurisdiction, after the completion of the counting process.
The voters from Chithanendal and Pandapanendal in Ramanathapuram district boycotted the polling for four hours as their polling booths had been swapped and they would have to travel 6 km to cast their vote. However, they gave up the boycott after the officials arranged for two vans to transport them to their booths.
The SEC notified elections to 1,18,974 rural local bodies on December 2. However, the Supreme Court, hearing petitions from the DMK and its allies, directed that elections in nine districts of Kancheepuram, Chengalpattu, Vellore, Tirupattur, Ranipet, Villupuram, Kallakurichi, Tirunelveli and Tenkasi should be deferred till the delimitation exercise is completed within three months and elections in 27 districts could go on.
Following this, the SEC issued fresh notification on December 7 for conducting elections to only 91,975 rural local body posts in 27 districts. This includes 27 district panchayats, 515 district panchayat ward members, 314 panchayat unions, 5,090 panchayat union ward members, 9,624 village panchayat presidents and 76,746 village panchayat ward members. A total of 3,02,994 nominations were received and of them, 3,643 were rejected during scrutiny.
As many as 18,570 candidates were 'elected unopposed' and 2,31,890 candidates are in the fray.