TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: No nominations were filed before both the north and south Goa district returning officers in the state, as the filing of nominations for the April 12 Lok Sabha elections began Wednesday.
Lok Sabha candidates have seven days time to file their nomination papers, with March 26 being the last date. Scrutiny of nominations will be held on March 27 and last day for withdrawal is March 29.
One of the key highlight of this year’s Lok Sabha polls is the extended hour for polling on April 12. Polling will begin at 7 am as usual but end at 6 pm instead of 5 pm in the earlier years. Goa is among one of the many states in the country where polling time has been extended by an hour.
Chief Electoral Officer Keshav Chandra also pointed out that this time the electronic voting machines (EVMs) will have an additional none of the above (NOTA) button for those who do not wish to vote for any of the enlisted candidates. However, the NOTA vote will be largely ineffective, since even if the NOTA votes are more than those received by the candidate with highest number of votes, no re-poll will be held and the candidates will not be disqualified from re-contesting, as done in many advanced democracies.
A total of 1,622 EVMs will be used at the identified polling stations across the state and polling staff is currently undergoing training for conduct of the polls.
Election observers would be in Goa within a day while election expenditure observers will arrive in Goa later this month.
As many as 10 contingents of CRPF have been requisitioned and Goa may seek more at a later stage. By March 23 the final supplementary voters list would be complete and released after the last day of withdrawal, the office of the CEO disclosed.
A little over 10.43 lakh voters are eligible for voting. Of this, close to 20,000 would be new voters in the age group of 18-20 years.
Upto January 31, 2014, as many as 18,412 applications were received under form 6 for inclusion of names, 2,606 applications under Form 7 for deletion, 6,094 applications under Form 8 for corrections and 1,135 applications under Form 8 (a)
for transposition.
