New Delhi: Counting of votes for the Lok Sabha polls will begin at 8.00 am Thursday. Due to tallying of voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips with EVM count for the first time, the results are expected only by late evening.
An estimated 67.11 percent of the 90.99 crore voters had cast their vote in the seven-phase elections. The seven phases of Lok Sabha elections took place from April 11 to May 19 Most of the exit polls have predicted that the BJP-led NDA is on course to retain power for a second term by winning more than 306 seats, while the Congress-led UPA and Others will secure 118 and 120 seats respectively. However, the opposition parties have trashed results of the exit polls, claiming that the BJP will suffer severe drubbing due to rising unemployment, farm distress and a slowdown in the economy. In the 2014 elections, the BJP won 282 seats while the Congress party had suffered a severe drubbing getting an all-time low of 44 seats as against 206 it won in 2009.
As per procedure, postal ballots would be the first to be counted The exercise of counting postal ballots manually will itself take a couple of hours at least, an EC official said. The paper trail machines slip will be counted in the end. In case of a mismatch, the results based on paper slip count will be considered as final.
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