Ghaziabad assembly by-poll: No withdrawals, 14 candidates in final fray
After the last day for withdrawal of nominations for the Ghaziabad assembly by-poll ended on Wednesday, there are 14 prospective candidates left in the fray as none of them opted to withdraw their nomination, said district election officials on Wednesday.
The district goes to bypoll on November 13 and the counting will take place on November 23. The assembly seat fell vacant after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s incumbent MLA Atul Garg contested the 2024 Lok Sabha election from Ghaziabad and won the seat.
A total of 19 candidates filed their nomination for the by-polls and five of them were rejected during the scrutiny process owing to discrepancies in their nomination forms, said election officials.
Thereafter, the 14 candidates had an option to withdraw their nomination till October 30, but none opted to do so.
“As a result, all 14 candidates are now in the final fray. With 14 candidates and one option for NOTA, we will be using only a single EVM unit for the upcoming election,” said Santosh Pandey, city magistrate and returning officer.
The list of 14 candidates left in fray include Singh Raj from the Samajwadi Party, Ravi Kumar from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Sanjeev Sharma from the Bharatiya Janata Party and Satyapal Chaudhary from the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), among others, who are from lesser known parties or independents.
It is expected that the voter turnout may dip this time, as voting is on a working day (Wednesday), but officials said that they are carrying out awareness drives to encourage voters to come out in large numbers to vote.
According to the district administration, the assembly seat has 461,360 voters (based on electoral rolls’ revision up to October 15) for the Ghaziabad assembly seat.
“As per the latest revision, the total voters stand at 461,644 in the assembly seat,” the returning officer said.
The district also has 119 polling centres and 506 polling booths. Four zonal magistrates and 22 sector magistrates were deployed on duty besides 16 other senior officials assigned different poll related work.
