Uttarakhand bypoll: 56.78% voter turnout in Kedarnath till 5 pm

Dehradun: A voter turnout of 56.78 per cent was recorded in the Kedarnath Assembly bypoll in Uttarakhand till 5 pm on Wednesday, officials said.

Polling began at 8 am and is scheduled to end at 6 pm. After a slow start, numbers of voters at polling booths swelled as the day progressed.

By 5 pm, 56.78 per cent of the electorate had cast their votes, an election official said.

A total of 173 polling booths were set up in the constituency, 130 of them equipped with CCTV cameras. The booths were monitored by the offices of the district and chief election officers as well as the Election Commission through webcasting, said Chief Electoral Officer BVRC Purushottam.

District electoral officer Saurabh Gaharwar visited polling booths to ensure voting was going on smoothly. He also appealed to people to come out in large numbers to vote.

At many booths, 'bulawa toli' volunteers were seen helping the old and the infirm. Elderly women being helped by female 'bulawa toli' volunteers up the steps at polling booths was a common sight in Agastyamuni and Rudraprayag.

Women voters in Kedarnath outnumber male voters. Of the 90,875 voters in the constituency, 45,956 are women and 44,919 are men.

Kedarnath seat in Rudraprayag district fell vacant after the death of BJP MLA Shaila Rani Rawat in July this year.

The ruling BJP is locked in a prestige battle in Kedarnath after losing in another important Hindu pilgrimage town, Badrinath, in the July bypolls. The BJP has 47 seats and the Congress 20 seats out of 70 in the Uttarakhand Assembly.

There are six candidates in the fray with a direct contest between BJP's Asha Nautiyal and Congress' Manoj Rawat.

Both Nautiyal and Rawat have represented the seat earlier in the state Assembly.

Nautiyal twice represented it in 2002 and 2007 while Rawat, a journalist-turned-politician, won it narrowly in 2017 defeating independent candidate Kuldip Singh Rawat by more than 850 votes.