Voters' verdict in bypolls in AP to come out tomorrow

Hyderabad, May 31 (UNI) Counting of votes polled in the May 29 by-elections to 18 Assembly and four Lok Sabha seats in Andhra Pradesh would start from 0800 hrs tomorrow.

The Election Commission (EC) has completed all arrangements for the counting process. As many as 18 counting centres have been set up for counting of votes polled in the Assembly byelections and 28 centres for the Lok Sabha bypolls.

In all, 1,600 poll personnel would be involved in the counting of votes recorded in 9,000 Electronic Voting Machines.

An estimated 60 per cent of the over 90 lakh voters, including 46.45 lakh women, had exercised their franchise in the by-elections to decide the fate of 29 candidates in the fray for four Lok Sabha seats and 145 candidates for the 18 Assembly seats.

The byelections to four Lok Sabha seats -- Warangal, Karimnagar, Hanamkonda and Adilabad -- and 16 Assembly seats were necessitated by the en masse resignation by Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) MPs and MLAs to press for a separate Telangana state, while two Assembly seats fell vacant following the deaths of sitting Khairatabad Congress Legislator P Janardhan Reddy in the city and Therlam MLA T Jayaprakash (TDP) in north coastal Andhra Pradesh.

Prominent MP candidates in the fray included former Union Labour Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao (Karimnagar), former State Roads and Building Minister K Jeevan Reddy, who had quit his post to fight the bypoll, and former Union Minister K Venugopalachary (TDP), who was pitted against TRS candidate T Madhusudan Reddy and Congress MLA A Indirakiran Reddy.

The bypolls would also decide the electoral fortunes of former TRS Ministers G K Vijayarama Rao (Ghanpur), V Lakshmikanta Rao (Huzurabad), T Harish Rao (Siddipet), N Narasimha Reddy (Musheerabad) and A Chandrasekar (Vikarabad), former TDP Ministers T Srinivas Yadav (Secunderabad), K Srihar (Ghanpur), M Narasimhulu (Alair), M Venkateswara Rao (Dichpali) and E Peddireddy (Huzurabad) and the State Government's special representative in New Delhi, Mallu Ravi (Jadcherla).

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