Mumbai civic poll results will be out tomorrow

Counting of votes following elections on Tuesday to 227 wards of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the country’s richest civic body, will be taken up on Thursday. Despite chaotic scenes at quite a few wards and lack of queues outside many polling booths, Mumbai saw a record voter turnout of 55.28% in elections on Tuesday.

Till now, Mumbai’s voting percentage has been a shameful 42-46%. During the last BMC elections, 44% of Mumbai had exercised its right to ballot.

“I thank Mumbaikars for their enthusiastic response. Psephologists say that if there is more voting percentage, it signifies change. These votes are for ‘parivartan’,” Ashish Shelar, Mumbai BJP president, said.

This time, many Mumbaikars found their names missing from the electoral list. In Dadar west, an entire building’s name went missing. The hapless residents went to different wards to enquire about their names. They also took help of the government app which was released to help people find their names in the electoral lists. But all the efforts went down the drain. “We have all voted here for almost 25 years now. This is the first time we have faced this problem,” said Deepika Ambre.

Voters from many parts of the city including Sewri, Wadala, Borivali, Bandra, Ghatkopar reported the same problem of names going missing from the voters’ list. According to unofficial figures, over 11 lakh people found their names missing in Mumbai.

The election process was peaceful across the city. The Mumbai police had detained nearly 3,000 people as a preventive measure.