MUMBAI: Various political parties in Maharashtra are taking extra efforts to ensure none of the votes cast by their MLAs and MPs turn invalid in Monday's presidential election.
MLAs and MPs form the electoral college to elect the President of India.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has fielded Droupadi Murmu for the Presidential election.
Former Union minister Yashwant Sinha is the candidate of the Opposition.
A Maharashtra BJP leader said on Sunday that the party has taken extra efforts to educate each of its MLAs and MPs on voting for the Presidential polls to avoid their ballots getting invalidated for any lacunae.
The BJP had conducted mock voting sessions for the MLAs and MPs.
"In 2017 (Presidential election), of the total votes cast, 77 were invalidated at the national level. We do not know how many invalidated votes were from Maharashtra but we want to avoid any such embarrassment this time," said the BJP leader.
The BJP has 106 MLAs in the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly along with 40 MLAs belonging to the Eknath Shinde faction of Shiv Sena besides ten independents who support the BJP.
The Shiv Sena faction led by Uddhav Thackeray with 15 MLAs has supported Murmu.
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress have 53 and 44 MLAs, respectively.
Of the total 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, 23 MPs belong to the BJP, 18 to Shiv Sena, four to NCP, and one to Congress.
Of the rest two MPs, one belongs to the All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and another is Independent.
The Congress and the NCP had organised meetings with their MLAs and MPs to ensure that they vote for the Opposition candidate Sinha and that cross-voting is avoided.