One constituency, one vote counting booth

MALDA, April 23: The Election Commission has recently directed that each Parliamentary constituencies will have only one counting premises, said Mr Sridhar Ghosh, the Malda district magistrate.

Earlier it was decided that counting would be held in different places based on the location of Assembly constituencies. Under the supervision of district election officials, the returning officer from one district would have collected the results from one or two Assembly segments from other district election officials and total the results of the seven Assembly constituencies for his one Parliamentary constituency.

But, following the recent order of the commission, the district election officials are arranging for each Parliamentary constituency to have only one counting premises.

In Malda, the district election officials are arranging two counting premises for two Parliamentary constituencies - North Malda and South Malda.

Malda College has been selected as the counting premises for South Malda Parliamentary seat and Malda Polytechnic has been selected for North Malda Parliamentary seat.

The election officials of Murshidabad district will make polling arrangements by deploying polling personnel in Farakka and Samserganj under South Malda parliamentary seat and receive all EVMs from them. Latter all EVMs will be transported to the strong room of the Malda College in the district headquarters, with full security in place for the counting.

Similarly, the Chanchal subdivision will arrange everything for conducting the polls on 30 April and receive EVMs and papers from the polling personnel. Later all the EVMs will be brought to Malda Polytechnic, close to Malda town, for counting.

On the other hand, the CEO in West Bengal has directed that micro-observers should be selected from the list of eligible officers by the Central observers. Polling stations will be assigned manually by the observers a day prior to the day of departure. It has been deemed unnecessary to randomise the selection process of micro-observers by using computer software. (SNS)