For the first time postal ballots will be used for persons with disabilities and senior citizens.

Elections to the Jharkhand Assembly will be held in five stages from November 30 to December 20 and the votes will be counted on December 23, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced on Friday.

With the term of the Assembly ending on January 5 next, the election process for the 81 constituencies will start on November 6, with the issuance of the notification for the first phase.

Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora said that in the first phase on November 30, 13 seats would go to the polls, followed by 20 on December 7, 17 on December 12, 15 on December 16 and 16 on December 20.

In a first, Mr. Arora said, postal ballots would be used for persons with disabilities and senior citizens. By the time the Delhi elections are held in 2020, it would be extended to the essential services.

A total of 29,464 polling stations, 19.54% more than the number in 2014, would be used for the polls, for which a total of 2.26 crore electors were eligible. Adequate security forces would be deployed in the State, which has 19 districts affected by Left-Wing Extremism. However, Mr. Arora declined to give the number of personnel that would be deployed.

When asked why the polls were being conducted in five phases, he pointed out that the 2009 and 2014 State elections were also held in five phases.

On simultaneous polls in the country, he said it would “require political consensus, not political brinkmanship”.

Congress poses a question

The Congress has questioned the need for a five-phase election. Party in-charge of the State RPN Singh said that for Maharashtra Assembly, which has 288 seats, and for the Haryana House having 90 seats, the ECI had only a single-phase election. “The ECI claims that a five-phase election is necessitated because of Naxal activity in the State. This is completely contrary to the claim made by Chief Minister Raghubar Das, who says that under his tenure Maoist activities are under check,” he told The Hindu.