Lucknow: Voting for 58 assembly seats in 11 districts of the state began at 7 am on Thursday under the first phase of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly Elections 2022. According to the information received from the Election Commission office, the voting work for the first phase of elections started at seven in the morning under the COVID protocol, which will continue till six in the evening. Polling is going on peacefully and no untoward incident has been reported from anywhere. Polling is being held in Shamli, Hapur, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Mathura and Agra districts in this phase.
The first phase of elections is being held in a Jat dominated area. In this phase, the political fate of a total of 623 candidates including state government ministers Shrikant Sharma, Suresh Rana, Sandeep Singh, Kapil Dev Agarwal, Atul Garg and Chaudhary Laxmi Narayan will be decided. These include 73 women candidates. State Chief Electoral Officer Ajay Kumar Shukla said that the Election Commission has made elaborate arrangements and security arrangements for conducting the elections in a fair, safe and peaceful manner.
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In view of COVID-19, adequate quantity of thermal scanner, sanitizer, gloves, face mask, face shield, PPE kit, soap, water have been arranged at the polling stations. He said that there are 2.28 crore eligible voters in the first phase of polling. Of these, 1.24 crore are male, 1.04 crore female and 1448 are transgender voters.
48 General Observers, eight Police Observers and 19 Expenditure Observers have also been deployed to keep a watchful eye on the polling. Apart from this, 2175 Sector Magistrates, 284 Zonal Magistrates, 368 Static Magistrates and 2718 Micro Observers have also been deployed. He told that in the absence of voter ID card, vote can be cast using 12 options including Aadhar card, MNREGA job card, PAN card and driving license.
In the last assembly elections held in 2017, the BJP had won 53 out of 58 seats in the first phase, while the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party got two seats each. Apart from this, a candidate of Rashtriya Lok Dal also won.