Over 80 pc polling in incident-free Tripura elections: EC

New Delhi, Feb 23 (UNI) The Election Commission today said over 80 per cent polling was recorded in the election for the 60-member Tripura Assembly when the last reports came in, while in several places, hundreds of people were still standing in queue to vote.

Briefing mediapersons here, Deputy Election Commissioner (DEC) R Balakrishnan said the election for the Tripura assembly was ''totally incident free''.

He said it was for the first time, the EC conducted the assembly election in any of the north-eastern states using 100 per cent Photo Electoral Rolls and Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC).

Though the EC had allowed nine other documents for identity verification, hardly has any person used those, he added.

The DEC said out of the 60 constituencies, 20 were reserved for the Scheduled Tribes, seven under Scheduled Castes and the rest were general category seats.

In all, there were 313 candidates out of which 283 are male and the 30 female, while the total electorate comprised 2,03,817 voters.

There were a total of 2391 polling stations in the state and in order to have free and fair elections, a total of 200 companies of the central para-military forces were deployed.

The EC had deployed an observer in each of the constituencies and a total of 707 micro observers for total monitoring of the entire election process.

Over 15,200 polling officials and 600 video cameras were been deployed in the State, Mr Balakrishnan added.

UNI BKS VD AS1829