Ranchi, May 19 (UNI) An average voter turn out of 70.50 per cent was recorded on the on three Lok Sabha seats of Santhal Pargana division of the state comprising Rajmahal (ST), Dumka (ST) and Godda in the seventh and last phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
Addressing a press conference here state's chief electoral officer L Khiyangate said polling on these seats had concluded peacefully without any major trouble and an average voter turn out of 70.50 per cent (tentative) was recorded.
Constituency-wise voter turn out in Rajmahal was 70.97 per cent, in Dumka it was 71.10 per cent and in Godda 69.02 per cent.
He said that no news of any untoward incident has been reported in this phase.
Mr Khiyangate said that in this phase 91.01 per cent Divyang voters had cast their votes.
He attributed arrangement of better facilities at the polling booths, resulted in huge turnout of the divyang voters.
In 2014 Lok Sabha elections Rajmahal had witnessed a voter turn out of 70.32 per cent, Dumka 70.94 per cent and Godda 65.98 per cent.
A total of 42 candidates were in the race for these three seats, including 14 in Rajmahal, 15 in Dumka and 13 in Godda.
A total of 45,64,681 lakh voters, including 23,64,541 male and 22,00,119 female voters, were eligible to vote in this phase.There were 6258 polling booths to elect their representative of the Lok Sabha.
Total number of booths in this phase was 6258 out of which 489 were in urban areas and another 5769 were in the rural areas.
The election commission had declared 1745 booths as hyper sensitive and another 2466 sensitive in this phase.
A total of 27,536 personnel were deployed on poll duty in this phase while facility of webcasting was available on 589 booths.
In order to ensure fair and peaceful elections, a total 37,398 personnel were deployed in this phase, which included 153 companies of central para military forces, 67 companies of the state police, 4700 home guards and 18,000 district police jawans .
Apart from that, two helicopters were also deployed to keep an eye on the movement of the Maoists in LWE areas.
Prominent candidates whose political future was locked in the EVMs, included Vijay Hansda of the JMM and Hemlal Murmu of the BJP from Rajmahal, Shibu Soren of JMM and Sunil Soren of BJP from Dumka, Pradeep Yadav of the JVM(P) and Nishikant Dubey of BJP from Godda.
UNI AK AND