Team Herald
PANJIM: Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Kunal, IAS, announced on Sunday that the notification for the elections to the two Lok Sabha seats and three vacant seats of the Goa State Legislative Assembly would be released on March 23, while the nomination process will be held on March 28.
The State will go for by-elections in Mandrem, Shiroda and Mapusa Assembly seats. The counting will take place on May 23 along with LS poll counting.
Interestingly, the Assembly seats of Mandrem and Shiroda, which had fallen vacant on October 16, post-resignation of then Congress MLAs Dayanand Sopte and Subhash Shirdokar, should have been filled by April 16 as the Constitutional guidelines, wherein the assembly seats have to be filled within six months.
Addressing media persons post announcement of election dates, Kunal said, “The ECI kept simultaneous polls considering all the aspects like model code of conducts, festivals, and other issues,” Kunal said.
As per the information provided by CEO, as on date total 11, 31,618 voters are eligible to cast their votes for the parliamentary elections. And for the by-elections, the total voters are 32,129 in Mandrem, 29,103 in Mapusa and 28,919 in Shiroda; and there are 276 service voters.
“People still have the time to apply for being voter. The last date will be March 25,” Kunal said.
The theme for the 2019 Parliamentary polls is ‘Accessible Elections’, and working on that direction, the CEO Goa has tapped 5,046 persons with disability, who are eligible to vote. A wheel-chair across all 1657 polling stations would be made available.
For those visually impaired, the names of candidates would also be made available to them through Braille script, the CEO said.
The unique app called ‘cVIGIL’, which stands ‘citizens vigil’, launched by ECI during the State Assembly elections held in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, last year, would be implemented during the polls. The app will help the people to make online complaints through videos or photos, and the action would be taken within 100 minutes.
Kunal said that there is extensive deployment of flying squads, static surveillance teams to ensure free and fair and level playing field for all candidates.
He informed that as per the ECI latest notification, the candidates with criminal background will have to release their details in print and electronic media before polls.
As many as 10,000 government servants would be deployed on poll duty. VVPTs would be used for polling across all polling stations.
However, this is not the first time the Parliamentary and Assembly by-elections would be held simultaneously in Goa.
