Biratnagar, December 16

Though the number of votes cast in the parliamentary and provincial polls under the first-past-the-post and proportional representation system is expected to be equal, some discrepancies have been noted in the record of votes maintained by the office of chief election officer in Morang.

As per the data made public by the office of the chief election officer, votes cast under the proportional representation system was short by 5,862 votes compared to the votes cast under the first-past-the-post system. Similarly, the total votes cast for the parliamentary seat under the FPTP system is said to be in exceeding by 751 votes in comparison to the votes cast for the provincial assembly.

A total of 465,034 votes were cast in parliament polls under the FPTP system in the district, while the number of votes for the provincial assembly under the same system stood at just 464,336 here. Likewise, 459,172 votes were cast under the proportional system in parliamentary and the provincial polls.

As for the invalid votes, under the FPTP system, the figures stood at 24,644 and 20,336 for the parliamentary and the provincial assembly respectively. On the other hand, under the proportional category, 41,369 and 65,150 votes were declared invalid for the parliamentary and provincial assembly respectively.

To see the data of unaccounted-for proportional votes cast for the parliament constituency-wise, some 275 of  the total 74,704 votes were found missing in Constituency-1, while the data stands 860 against the total 80,249 votes in Constituency-2, and 747 of 91,609 votes in Constituency-3. Similarly, 922 of 71,058 votes in Constituency-4, 2,210 of 68,292 votes in Constituency-5 and 848 of 79,128 votes in Constituency-6 were found missing.

Meanwhile, the discrepancies are blamed on the negligence of the polling staffers. A total of 1,516 polling officers and their deputies were stationed at 758 polling

centres in the district. Additional 3,032 junior staffers were deployed at the voting centres.

Chief Election Officer Raju Kumar Khatiwada admitted there could be some technical weakness on their part. “As voters had three separate ballot papers, some of them might have forgotten to pick the last ballot paper which was for proportional representation system,” he reasoned.