Bara, September 21

Due to dispute among parties’ representatives, vote counting of four local units including Kolhabi municipality, Adarsh rural municipality, Baragadi rural municipality and Subarna rural municipality of Bara has been halted.

Ballot counting at Baragadi has been disrupted since Sunday evening while in other places it has halted since Tuesday. The vote counting at Kolhabi Municipality stopped due to wrong vote reporting. “Attempts to resume vote counting at the municipality are under way through an all-party meeting,” said Chief Returning Officer Ritendra Thapa.

The election officials had mistakenly reported 500 more ballots for the UML mayoral candidate Bharat Bhandari while bringing out the vote counting result. Dispute erupted among other party representatives over the issue, said Sri Ram Sah, a local.

Vote counting has stopped at Adarsh Kotwal rural municipality over the ballot result. Vote counting at Baragadi rural municipality has stopped for two days as the CPN-Maoist Centre representatives questioned the ballot box being opened in their absence.

Similarly, vote counting was disrupted at Subarna rural municipality due to obstruction by NC representatives. Though Nepali Congress agreed to start vote counting beginning from Ward No 1 and 10 and the remaining ones serially, they insisted on beginning the count with Ward No 2 first, later.