Virudhunagar
Virudhunagar district administration has made all arrangements for the counting of votes for Virudhunagar Lok Sabha constituency and Sattur Assembly byelection at two centres here on Thursday.
Counting of votes of Virudhunagar Parliamentary seat will be taken up at Virudhunagar Vellaichamy Nadar Polytechnic College.
Boxes containing postal ballots, around 10,000, of the Lok Sabha election, would be moved at around 6.30 a.m. from the Collectorate to the counting centre by armed police personnel.
“Those postal ballots that are to be received on Thursday morning would be delivered at the counting centre by 8 a.m. through a special arrangement,” an official said. The postal ballots and electronically transmitted postal ballot system (meant for service personnel) would be counted in a separate hall.
While two tables have been put up for counting postal ballots, five tables with computers would be used for scanning the QR codes in the ETPBS votes.
Counting of postal ballots and votes in electronic voting machines would simultaneously start at 8 a.m.
The EVMs counting would be taken up Assembly constituency-wise on 14 tables each. This would be done by a supervisor and an assistant under the vigil of a micro-observer for each table, the Returning Officer, A. Sivagnanam, said.
After all the votes in the EVMs are counted, paper slips of five randomly-selected VVPATs would be taken up for counting.
Counting of votes of Sattur Assembly constituency will be held at Virudhunagar Senthikumara Nadar College.
Besides 1,125 postal ballots, 130 ETPBS votes would be counted in a separate hall. The votes in EVMs would be counted on 14 tables, the Returning Officer, A. Kalimuthu, said.
The postal ballots, EVMs and VVPATs from Sattur Assembly constituency would be kept in safe custody at the office of Revenue Divisional Officer, Sattur.
Around 1,000 officials and employees would be deployed for counting in the two centres where over 1,100 police personnel would provide security.
