Pune: Graduate voters and teachers clan is supposedly the most trusted vote bank and plays a crucial role in the Maharashtra Legislative Council (MLC) polls. However, this time more than 19 thousand votes were considered as void.
A provisional voter turnout of 63.89 per cent was registered in the elections held for five seats of the Maharashtra Legislative Council on Tuesday. The polls were seen as a prestige battle between the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government and the opposition BJP.
Interestingly, a large number of voters seemed to be unaware of the process during voting for the first preference candidate. Voters used their own pen instead of the pen kept by the election officials, made their signatures and tick-marked instead of writing preference number 1. Some voters had remarked about social issues like the Maratha reservation and subsidies. Several voters wrote only 1 in front of a candidate and left everything else blank while some wrote only number 3 in front of some candidates.
Nationalist Congress Party’s Arun Lad and Satish Bhanudasrao Chavan have registered victory from Pune Division Graduates’ constituency and Aurangabad Division Graduates’ constituency, respectively. Earlier on Thursday, Bharatiya Janata Party’s Amrish Rasiklal Patel won bye-election to the Maharashtra Legislative Council from Dhule-cum-Nandurbar Local Authorities’ Constituency 2020.
NCP’s Arun Lad won the seat by around 49,000 seats. The NCP candidate defeated his BJP rival by a margin of 48,824 votes. While Lad polled 1,22,145 votes, Deshmukh managed to bag just 73,321 votes. In the Aurangabad graduate constituency seat, the NCP’s Satish Chavan (the MVA candidate) won it big and bagged the seat for the third consecutive time by beating his BJP adversary Satish Boralkar by more than half-lakh votes. Chavan polled 1.16 lakh votes.
Meanwhile, in the Pune Teachers constituency, the MVA’s Jayant Aasgavkar (Congress) led by a vote of 6,000 against his nearest rival Dattaray Sawant who was an independent candidate.