Assembly elections 2019 Exit Polls: Voting ends at 6pm, all eyes on exit polls now

assembly-elections

Updated: Oct 21, 2019 13:42 IST

The single-phase assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana will end at 6pm on Monday with the close of voting in 378 constituencies across the two states.

All eyes are on exit polls now, which television channels will start airing soon after the end of voting.

Millions of voters cast their ballot to decide the fate of 4406 candidates - 1169 in Haryana and 3237 in Maharashtra - in this assembly elections.

The BJP, which had Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah leading the party’s electoral campaign, looking to grab power for the second straight term in Maharashtra and Haryana.

On the other hand, the opposition Congress looked devoid of firepower in terms of participation of central leaders in poll campaigning.

The exit polls are based on responses of the people who have just cast their votes. Pollsters, assuming that the voters have correctly revealed their choice, predict the results much before the actual counting of votes.

Results of elections in India can be extremely hard to predict and there have been instances where pollsters have been spectacularly off the mark. At least four exit polls have predicted wrongly, barring those in the 1998 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

In the 1999 elections, forced by an early collapse of the government led by BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee, most polls overrated the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’s) win. They gave the NDA overwhelming 315-plus seats but it actually won 296.

With results out on October 24, exit polls, which have often proved unreliable in India, are seen as indicators to which party forms the government.

In Maharashtra, there are 288 assembly seats of which 29 are reserved for Scheduled Castes and 25 for Scheduled Tribes. There are 90 assembly constituencies of which 17 are reserved for the Scheduled Castes in Haryana.

There are a 1,81,91,228 voters in Haryana and 8,94,46,211 voters in Maharashtra. Both states have a lakh service voters each.

The Sena-BJP alliance currently hold 217 seats in Maharashtra and the Congress and the NCP 56 seats.

The BJP won 47 seats in Haryana in the last assembly polls and has now set a target of more than 75 seats in the state.

Both national-level factors and specific state-level configurations and issues are expected to influence the outcome of elections in both states.