Polling to begin today (April 19) on 102 Loksabha seats for the first phase of Lok Sabha elections-2024. Voting will start at 8:00 am and will continue till 5:00 pm. Voting time on 19th April will be from 8 AM to 5 PM. But those who were in the queue till 5 PM but their turn to vote did not come, will have an extra hour for such people.
In the first phase, polling to be held on 39 seats in Tamil Nadu, 5 in Uttarakhand, 2 in Arunachal Pradesh, 12 seats in Rajasthan, elections are to be held on 5 seats in Maharashtra, 5 in Assam, 4 in Bihar, 6 in Madhya Pradesh, 8 in Uttar Pradesh, 3 in West Bengal and one Lok Sabha seat each in Tripura, Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh.
As per the election commission, more than 16.63 crore voters will be able to exercise their franchise at 1.87 lakh polling stations. The voters include 8.4 crore men, 8.23 crore women and 11,371 third gender. 35.67 lakh people have become voters for the first time. Along with this, there are 3.51 crore young voters in the age group of 20-29 years.
41 helicopters, 84 special trains and nearly 1 lakh vehicles have been deployed to ferry polling and security personnel.Webcasting will be done in more than 50 per cent of the polling stations along with the deployment of micro observers in all polling stations.
Union Road, Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari, former Telangana Governor and Lt. Governor of Puducherry Tamilisai Soundararajan and BJP state president in Tamil Nadu K Annamalai are among the prominent BJP candidates in this phase. Congress’ leader in Karnataka, Karti Chidambaram and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader Dayanidhi Maran are also contesting in the first phase.