Eight nominations were rejected on Friday in the scrutiny of nomination papers filed in the Kottayam Lok Sabha constituency. In all, 15 candidates had filed nominations in the constituency.
According to officials, the nominations were rejected by Returning Officer and Collector P.K. Sudheer Babu on grounds of lapses in recording details in the nomination papers and the affidavits attached to them.
The scrutiny of documents was carried out in the presence of General Election Observer Nitin K. Patil and representatives of the candidates.
With this, seven persons, including UDF candidate Thomas Chazhikkadan, LDF candidate V.N. Vasavan and NDA candidate P.C. Thomas are in the fray in the Kottayam Lok Sabha constituency. The others in the fray are E.V. Prakash of SUCI, Jijo Mon Joseph of BSP and Independents Ignatius Illimoottil and Thomas J. Nidheeri.
Of the eight nominations rejected, seven belonged to Independent candidates while the nomination filed by CPI(M) dummy candidate T.R. Raghunathan was also rejected.
The candidates are permitted to withdraw their nominations till 3 p.m. on April 8.
Voters’ list
Meanwhile, the authorities have published the final list of 15,30,587 voters in Kottayam district ahead of the elections on April 23. The updated list includes 7,79,206 women and ten voters from the transgender community. Of the nine Assembly constituencies in the district, Kaduthuruthy has the highest number of voters — 1.81 lakh persons while Kottayam accounted for the lowest number of voters — 1.56 lakh persons.
As many as 13,644 officers will be deployed on poll duty across the 1,564 polling stations in the district.
