How Kartikeya Sharma won Rajya Sabha seat despite getting lesser votes than Ajay Maken

In Haryana, the results of voting for two Rajya Sabha seats on Friday came on Saturday morning with BJP candidate Krishan Lal Panwar and BJP-JJP backed independent candidate Kartikeya Sharma winning both the seats.

Congress in Haryana faced a major setback and was left embarrassed when after a daylong drama, results were announced for the Rajya Sabha polls.

Ajay Maken, who secured more votes than Sharma, yet, lost his chance of getting Rajya Sabha membership.

Maken got 29 votes while Sharma managed 28 votes.

Actually, this reversal happened because the counting of votes for Rajya Sabha is done in a slightly different way.

There are a total of 90 MLAs in the Haryana legislative assembly.

Out of 31 Congress legislators, party general secretary Ajay Maken secured 29. Of the remaining two, Kuldeep Bishnoi voted for BJP-backed independent candidate Kartikeya Sharma and the other vote was declared invalid.

Another independent MLA Balraj Kundu did not take part in the voting. Hence the total number of votes were reduced to 88. It meant that candidates needed 29.34 votes to win.

Since Panwar had already managed to get 31 votes, his excess 1.66 votes went to Kartikeya Sharma, as he was the BJP-JJP-backed candidate.

This way, Sharma's total vote became 29.66 (28+1.66) and he won. While Maken lost his election even after getting 29 votes.