Bihar’s crucial assembly elections will be held in three phases starting on October 28 and votes will be counted on November 10, the Election Commission of India announced on Friday.
The 2020 Bihar assembly election will be the first poll to be conducted since the coronavirus pandemic broke out in the country.
Here are the Bihar assembly elections in numbers:
* The 243-member assembly is scheduled to end on November 29 of this year.
* Bihar has an electoral poll of more than 72 million voters and the state registered a turnout of more than 58% in the last elections held in 2015.
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* The 2020 Bihar Assembly elections will be held in three phases: October 28, November 3 and November 7. State elections were held in five phases in 2015.
* In the first phase, the electoral districts of 71 assemblies will go to the polls with 31,000 polling stations enabled to do so. In the second phase, 94 assembly constituencies with 42,000 polling stations dedicated to it. In the third phase, 78 districts will have 33,500 polling stations.
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* Chief Elections Commissioner Sunil Arora said that according to reports from the Bihar electoral director, more than 700,000 units of hand sanitizers, 44.6 million masks, 600,000 personal protective suits, 760,000 face shields have been disposed of and 2.3 million gloves for voting staff. The commission has also purchased another 7.2 million single-use hand gloves for voters to use to cast their vote at the polling stations.
* Arora said that with the update of the electoral rolls, 230,000 migrant voters who have returned to the state have joined the list.
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* Voting time was also increased by one hour from 7 am to 6 pm in the 2020 Bihar Assembly Elections.
* The number of tables in a counting room has been cut in half, from 14 to seven. A maximum of 1,000 people will be allowed to vote in an electoral college. It’s a significant reduction from the previous figure of 1,500.
* Voters must be six feet apart at the voting booths, where soaps, water, and hand sanitizers will be made available at the entry points.
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