Voting today for civic polls in Punjab

Chandigarh: Civic polls to elect representatives to three municipal corporations and 29 municipal councils and nagar panchayats in Punjab are being held today. The campaigning for the polls ended on Friday. The voting will take place from 8 AM till 4 PM, a spokesman of the state election commission said. He said there would be a total of 873 polling stations in the state with 1,938 polling booths. A total of 8,000 election staff and 15,500 police personnel would be on duty at these polling stations. The spokesman also said that according to a report of the district administration, in Amritsar 154 polling stations out of total 366 were declared sensitive and 136 very sensitive. Similarly, out of 554 polling booths in Jalandhar, 344 have been declared sensitive and 31 as very sensitive. The spokesman said that election commission has ordered videography in all the polling stations which have been declared very sensitive. As many as 925 candidates for the elections to the three municipal corporations (MC)-Amritsar, Patiala and Jalandhar are in the fray. The counting of votes will take place on December 17 and result will also come out on the same day. This would be for the first time that voters will have the 'None Of The Above' (NOTA) option in civic body polls in the state. Interestingly, a joint delegation of the SAD and the BJP had urged Punjab Governor V P Singh Badnore to order a judicial probe into the "politico-administration-election-observer nexus" which has "throttled" democracy during elections to the municipal bodies in the state. They had alleged that the "nexus" was working to "further" the cause of the Congress.