Kendrapara: Around 42 per cent voter turnout was recorded till 1:00pm Saturday in the election to Odisha’s Patkura Assembly seat, where polling is under way since morning after being postponed twice in past few months.
Tight security arrangements have been made to ensure peaceful polling, and no untoward incident has been reported so far from anywhere in the constituency in coastal Kendrapara district, an election official said.
“An estimated 42 per cent of the voters have exercised their franchise till 1:00pm… Polling in Patkura is under way in a smooth and peaceful manner,” he said.
An electorate of 2,44,747, including 1,17,306 women, are eligible to vote in the election for which 1,700 polling personnel have been deployed.
Voting was delayed in some booths due to glitches in Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), which were corrected with immediacy, the official said.
The constituency is witnessing an interesting political battle with Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s bete noire, Bijoy Mohapatra of the BJP, locked in a fight with BJD nominee, Sabitri Agarwal.
Mohapatra, a four-time MLA and one of the founders of the BJD, was ousted from the party by Patnaik just before the 2000 assembly polls. Since then, he has not been able to make it to the state assembly.
(PTI)