Here’s why DUSU polls winners’ celebrations were delayed by over two hours

india

Updated: Sep 13, 2019 16:52 IST

Akhil Bhartiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has won three of the top four posts on offer in the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) polls, while the Congress party associated National Students Union of India (NSUI) managed to win the post of the secretary after counting finished on Friday afternoon.

Akshit Dahiya has been elected the DUSU president and Pradeep Tanwar, also from the ABVP, won the election for the vice president’s position. NSUI’s Ashish Lamba has been chosen the secretary while Shivangi Kherwal from the ABVP has been elected the joint secretary.

It is a repeat of last year’s results when the ABVP had won three posts and NSUI one.

The counting was supposed to start at 8.30 am on Friday but began after almost a two-hour delay as the candidates turned up late, a PTI report said.

That was not the only problem, according to a PTI report, the screens which show live counting weren’t functioning either when counting started. It drew protests from the student bodies and candidates, who demanded that the screens be fixed before the counting began. The counting finally started around 10.30 am after one of the four screens started to broadcast live counting details. Only one EVM’s votes were being counted initially and counting of votes on the rest of the three EVMs began as soon as all four screens started functioning.

Votes were counted at the Community Hall of the Police Lines in northwest Delhi’s Kingsway Camp.

The voter turnout in DUSU polls on Thursday was recorded at 39.90 per cent, over four notches down from the last year. Last year, the election saw a 44.46 per cent voter turnout.

The polling for four positions of the DUSU ended amid allegations of EVM malfunctioning. Sixteen candidates, including 4 women, were in the fray and 52 polling centres were set up.

Over 1.3 lakh students were eligible to cast their vote. As many as 144 EVMs were used for students’ union polls and 137 were used for college union polls.

There were long queues to cast votes at Law Faculty, Miranda House and Ramjas College. In the North Campus, almost 400 police personnel were deployed to prevent any untoward incident, police said.