Kalaburgi, Jun 13: Congress candidate Chandrashekhar B Patil has defeated his nearest rival K.B. Srinivas of BJP by a slender margin of 321 votes in the North-East Graduates constituency of Karnataka Legislative Council. With this the grand-old party has ended three-decade dominance of saffron party in the constituency.
Speaking to media soon after his victory, Mr. Patil attributed his success to his hard work and intensive poll campaign among the targeted voters. He thanked the voters and assured them of fulfilling his promises.
The counting of the votes polled in the election held on last Friday started on Tuesday morning at the Department of Mathematics in Gulbarga University and continued throughout the day and intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday.
The final results were out by till 5.20 am on Wednesday after several rounds of preferential votes were counted as none of the candidates could cross the halfway mark in the first preferential votes.
As the first of the four rounds of the first preferential vote counting was over by 5.30 pm Tuesday, as many as 13,997 votes had been counted and N. Pratap Reddy of Janata Dal (Secular) was leading with 5,017 votes over his nearest rival K.B. Srinivas of BJP who had secured 3,767 votes. Congress candidate Chandrashekhar B Patil was in third place with 2,124 votes.
When the second round of counting was over by 8 pm, 24,736 votes had been counted. Mr. Reddy, Mr. Srinivas and Mr. Patil had got 8,151, 7,883 and 5,718 votes respectively. Mr. Reddy's lead margin was down from 1,250 in the first round to 268 in the second round.
At the end of the third round, Mr. Srinivas was leading by 590 votes over his nearest rival Mr. Reddy who had secured 11,078 votes. Mr. Patil was following them closely with 9,480 votes.
In the fourth and final round of counting of preferential votes also, Mr. Srinivas had 14,955 votes in his basket and maintained the lead of 650 votes over his Congress rival Mr. Patil (14,305 votes). JD(S) candidate Mr. Reddy who had 13,311 votes was pushed to third place. However, none of the candidates crossed the halfway mark and get the magic number of 24,414 to emerge victorious.
The winning formula was to get more than half of the valid votes excluding NOTA votes. There were 48,826 valid votes excluding NOTA votes against the total 55,471 votes polled.
Since no candidate in the top of the grid got to the finishing line in the first preferential votes, the process of eliminating the candidates from the bottom of the grid and distributing the preferential votes on their ballot papers among the respective candidates began just a few minutes after the midnight.
Even after eliminating 8 of the 10 candidates, including Mr. Reddy of JD(S) who was leading in the first two rounds, neither Mr. Srinivas nor Mr. Patil could touch the magic figure of 24,414. At the final tally, Mr. Patil of Congress had 18,768 votes in his account and Srinivas of BJP had 18,447 votes. Mr. Patil of Congress was declared a winner as he was leading by 321 votes.
Pankaj Kumar Pandey, Regional Commissioner and Election Officer of the constituency and Deputy Commissioner R. Venkatesh Kumar had camped in the counting centre till the process was completed on Wednesday morning.
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