Election to pick next Vice President on September 9 after Dhankhar's surprise resignation

New Delhi: The election to the post of Vice President, which fell vacant due to the dramatic resignation of Jagdeep Dhankhar last month, will be held on September 9, the Election Commission announced on Friday.

The notification will be issued on August 7 while the last date of filing nominations will be on August 21, scrutiny a day later and withdrawal on August 25.

If there are more than one candidate, polling will be held in room number F-101, Vasudha, on the first floor of Parliament building on September 9 between 10 AM and 5 PM.

This will be the first time a Vice Presidential poll will be held in the new Parliament building while such elections in the past few times were held in Committee Rooms 62 or 63 of the Old Parliament building. The counting of votes will also be held soon after the polling ends, an EC statement said.

A contest is in cards with Congress General Secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh saying that the consensus is not created by the Opposition but the government and there is "no consensus possible with Prime Minister Narendra Modi".

The electoral college consists of 788 MPs but at present it is only 782, owing to five vacancies in Rajya Sabha and one in Lok Sabha. At present, the NDA has a clear edge in the electoral college with 427 in its support and the Opposition at least 323, including 12 AAP MPs who are not part of I.N.D.I.A. There are around 30 other MPs who are not aligned to NDA or I.N.D.I.A.

The EC appointed Rajya Sabha Secretary General P C Mody as the returning officer for the poll. Rajya Sabha Joint Secretary Garima Jain and Director Vijay Kumar have also been appointed Assistant Returning Officers.

The voting will be through a system of proportional representation by means of single transferable vote. The winning candidate will require 391 votes, if all eligible voters exercise their franchise and their votes are valid. The voting is through secret ballot and parties cannot issue a Whip to MPs on voting. For marking their preferences in numerical, the EC will supply particular pens and the MPs have to mark the ballot only with this pen and not with any other pen.

Candidates or any of his proposers or seconders can file nominations between 11 AM to 3 PM, except public holidays between August 7 and 21. A nomination paper has to be subscribed by at least 20 MPs as proposers and by at least another 20 as seconders. No MP can subscribe to more than one nomination paper, as either a proposer or a seconder.

A candidate can file maximum of four sets of nomination papers and the security deposit for the election is Rs 15,000, which is required to be made along with the nomination paper, or should be deposited in the RBI or a government treasury.

There is no concept of open voting in this election and showing the ballot to anyone, like in Rajya Sabha elections, under any circumstances in the case of Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections is totally prohibited, the EC added.