MADURAI: The DMK registered a thumping victory in the by-polls for the Thirumangalam Assembly constituency with its candidate Latha Adhiyaman getting almost twice the number of votes that her AIADMK rival, M Muthuramalingam, did. All the other candidates, including T Dhanapandian of the DMDK, forfeited their deposit.
The results announced on Monday showed that the DMK got 79,422 votes, which is 57.47 per cent of the total ballots cast, while the AIADMK candidate, who was a former DMK MLA, bagged 40,156 votes or 29.06 per cent of the total votes cast (39,266 less than the DMK nominee).
It is significant that in the 2006 election, the DMK candidate V Velusamy polled 40,923 votes, while Veera Ilavarasan, the MDMK candidate, polled 45,607 votes (more than 37 per cent of the total votes) to win the seat. Dhanapandian, who secured only 13,136 votes this time, had got 19,970 votes in 2006.
Latha Adhiyaman led Muthuramalingam by at least 1,000 votes right from the first round of counting. The gap kept increasing and proved too big for the AIADMK candidate to bridge.
U Paramasivan of the Shiv Sena, who contested as an Independent candidate, took the third spot with 1,129 votes, while R Padmanabhan, the nominee of the AISMK, which was contesting the polls for the first time, was relegated to the fifth place with a mere 831 votes.
The candidate who polled the least number of votes was Babu Venkatesh, an Independent (33 votes).
As many as 1,38,191 of the 1,55,647 voters cast their ballots on January 9. However, this time no postal ballots were received.