Baramulla, May 20 (IANS) Voting started on a positive note on Monday in the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency as a bright sunny day greeted the electors at the festively decorated polling station.
Voters started queuing up at various polling stations in the 18 Assembly segments of this constituency right from the morning.
There are 17,37,865 voters, including 8,75,831 male and 8,62,000 female, besides 34 third-gender voters in this constituency.
Of these around 17,128 persons with disability and 527 persons above the age of 100 years who will be exercising their franchise.
The Election Commission has set up 2,103 polling stations across four districts of Baramulla, Kupwara, Bandipora, and parts of Budgam that fall in this constituency.
Special polling stations have been established for migrant voters of the Kashmir division.
A total of 26 special polling stations have been established with 21 polling stations in Jammu, four in Delhi, and one in Udhampur district, respectively.
More than 8,000 polling staff, including reserves, have been deployed on duty on Monday.
Besides, there are 28 border polling stations in Kupwara and Baramulla districts.
There are 23 candidates in the fray here while the main contest is going to be between Omar Abdullah, former Chief Minister and National Conference (NC) candidate, Sajad Gani Lone of the People’s Conference (PC), and Engineer Rasheed of the Awami Itihad Party (AIP), presently detained in Tihar Jail in Delhi.
Voting started at 7 a.m. and will end at 6 p.m.
However, voting will continue even after 6 p.m. if the voters’ queue is still there in the polling station premises to exercise their right to vote.
All 2,103 polling stations of this constituency have CCTV cameras for live webcasting and in total 4,206 cameras and 50 additional CCTV cameras at main entrances of the polling stations have been deployed.
Polling is being monitored through 24X7 integrated command and control rooms established at the Chief Electoral Officer level with latest technologies and all the polling stations will be monitored throughout the day by a tech-savvy team.
–IANS
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