BENGALURU : The results of the intensely fought biennial elections to 25 Legislative Council seats from 20 local body constituencies will be announced on Tuesday.
The election witnessed a record voter turnout of 99.8% on Friday. In all, 90 candidates are in the fray.
The BJP and the Congress have fielded 20 candidates each and the JDS is contesting from six seats.
The BJP leaders, including Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai, have expressed confidence of the party winning over 15 seats to get a clear majority in the Upper House, while the Congress hopes to retain the 14 seats that it had won in 2015.
The JDS, however, is fighting to retain its hold in the Old Mysuru region. Currently, the ruling BJP is the single largest party with 32 seats, followed by Congress (29) and JDS (12).
Officials have made all arrangements to start counting of votes by 8 am on Tuesday.
The results in some seats are likely to be known as early as afternoon and the picture will be clear in all the seats by evening.
In a single-member constituency, a candidate getting 50% of valid votes plus one vote will be declared elected in the first round, but if that doesn’t happen, second preference votes will be taken up for counting and that may take some time, the officials explained.
For instance, in Bengaluru Urban, four candidates are contesting from the seat and 2,070 votes are polled.
The officials will start the process by placing 300 votes on each table and start segregating valid and invalid votes.
Valid votes will be taken up for counting of first preference votes.
In the first round, if the candidate getting the highest votes fails to get 1,036 votes (half-plus one), the second round will be taken up by eliminating the votes of the candidate getting the lowest number of votes and distributing them to others for second preference votes.
The process will go on till a candidate gets the highest votes.
In a dual-member constituency, candidates will be declared elected based on a quota system depending on the number of preferential valid votes.