The third phase of Bihar elections witnessed 53.32 per cent voting on Wednesday with highest being from Buxar at 56.58 per cent. The polling took place for 50 seats in the high-stake third phase, which has Rashtriya Janat Dal president Lalu Prasad’s two sons as candidates.
By the end of the voting time, Saran recorded 52.50% polling, Vaishali – 54.82%, Nalanda – 54.11%, Patna – 51.82%, Bhojpur – 53.33% and Buxar – 56.58%.
Voting started at scheduled 7 AM in 14,170 polling stations and ended at 4 PM in 10 constituencies due to security reasons and at 5 PM in the rest 40 constituencies, Additional Chief Electoral Officer R Lakshamanan said.
A total of 808 candidates were in the fray, out of which 71 were female.
The two sons of Lalu Prasad, Tej Pratap Yadav and Tejaswi Yadav, contested from Mahua and Raghopur seats respectively.
The former chief minister’s political turf Saran, which has 10 Assembly seats, and the seven-seat Nalanda, home district of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, were covered in the third phase.
Of the total 14,170 polling stations, 6,747 were declared as critical and 1,909 as Left Wing Extremist hit polling stations.
All the booths were manned by central forces and live webcasting was done from 716 polling stations.
