Graduates and teachers vote for 11 UP Council seats after voter-slip row and videography plea

Graduates and teachers across 72 districts of Uttar Pradesh voted on Friday to fill 11 seats in the state Legislative Council, after a fresh round of complaints about the voter lists.

Polling ran from 8 am to 4 pm on ballot papers, not electronic voting machines, at 2,697 polling stations. There are 152 candidates and nearly 15 lakh registered voters. Five seats are graduates’ constituencies (Lucknow, Varanasi, Agra, Meerut and Allahabad-Jhansi) and six are teachers’ constituencies (Lucknow, Varanasi, Agra, Meerut, Bareilly-Moradabad and Gorakhpur-Faizabad). Votes will be counted on 27 October.

Turnout and tempers

In the Gorakhpur-Faizabad teachers’ constituency, which has 54,910 voters spread over 17 districts and 200 polling stations, 35.07% had voted by noon. At one Gorakhpur polling centre, Samajwadi Party candidate Sanjay Tripathi was briefly caught in a heated argument with BJP mandal in-charge Ashish Gupta, who objected to Tripathi speaking to reporters inside the premises. Voting was not disrupted.

Liquor shops were shut in districts under dry-day orders. In Gorakhpur, District Magistrate Deepak Meena ordered bars and liquor shops within 8 km of the polling and counting venue closed until counting is over.

A row over voter slips

The run-up to the vote was dominated by the Allahabad-Jhansi graduates’ roll. On Wednesday, Samajwadi Party candidate and sitting MLC Man Singh Yadav complained to the Prayagraj district magistrate that voter slips carried absurd entries, including “Ram Ne Yadav Ko Mara” as a name and “Murkh Chand Yadav” as a father’s name, and “B.Com” in the father’s name column. Opposition leaders shared the slips widely.

The Election Commission ordered an inquiry on Thursday and sought a report from the Jhansi divisional commissioner, who is the electoral registration officer for the seat. The report has been submitted but not made public. The BJP has separately alleged 4,397 duplicate or fake entries on the same roll, 3,163 of them in Prayagraj, and asked the Chief Electoral Officer to remove them.

Cameras in every booth

On the eve of polling, the Election Commission told the Allahabad High Court that it would carry out “continuous, uninterrupted videography of polling proceedings inside all polling stations”, as its 2016 Handbook for Returning Officers requires. Justices Alok Mathur and Abdhesh Kumar Chaudhary recorded the statement and closed the petition by Shailendra Singh, an independent candidate in the Lucknow graduates’ seat, whose counsel said the assurance met his grievance.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath campaigned extensively for the polls, while Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav urged graduates and teachers on social media to turn out and vote.