More than 55 per cent of the electorate cast their votes on Tuesday to seal the fate of five candidates in the fray for the Bageshwar assembly bypoll in Uttarakhand.
Bageshwar District Magistrate Anuradha Paul said 55.44 per cent voting was recorded in the bypoll. The voter turnout for the seat in 2022 assembly polls was 60.01 per cent, she said.
The counting of votes will take place on September 8 and the result will be declared on the same day.
Voters who were in queue at the booths at 5 pm, the closing time for polling, were allowed to vote, the DM said.
Polling was peaceful with no untoward incident reported from anywhere, she said, adding an EVM machine at Mandal Sera polling booth went out of order at 2 pm which was quickly replaced.
There are about 1.2 lakh voters in the constituency.
Earlier, people, including women, in large numbers began queuing up outside the polling booths from 6 am.
The BJP has fielded Parvati Das against Congress candidate Basant Kumar.
Parvati Das is the wife of Chandan Ram Das whose death in April this year necessitated the bypoll. He had won from the seat four times since 2007.
The seat has witnessed straight contests between traditional rivals BJP and Congress in successive elections since the creation of the state in 2000.
Congress' Kumar had contested the 2022 assembly polls from Bageshwar as an Aam Aadmi Party candidate. He quit the AAP to join the Congress just few days before being fielded by the latter from the seat.
Apart from the BJP and Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal and the Uttarakhand Parivartan Party have also thrown their hat in the ring.
Political observers feel the bypoll result will be a referendum on Pushkar Singh Dhami government's decisions like formation of an expert committee to draft a Uniform Civil Code, stricter laws against forced conversion, and crackdown against illegal encroachments ahead of 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The BJP won all the five Lok Sabha seats in the state in the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary elections.
The bypoll result is also being touted as a progress report of the Dhami-led BJP government, which has completed over a year of its second term after registering a massive win in the 2022 Uttarakhand assembly elections.
The 70-member Uttarakhand Assembly at present has 46 MLAs from the ruling BJP, 19 from the Congress, two from the Bahujan Samaj Party and two independents.