11 CANDIDATES GOT LESS THAN 100 VOTES IN PUNJAB

NEW DELHI: More than 100 candidates have failed to score even 100 votes in the assembly polls across five states, including activist Irom Sharmila, who could get just 90 votes and vowed to never contest elections again.

In Punjab, at least three seats saw more than one candidate getting less than 100 votes, while three other seats had one such candidate each.

Number of such candidates was five or more in some constituencies, including in Allahabad North and Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, as also in Uttarakhand’s Rajpur and Punjab’s Guru Har Sahai.

While most such candidates were independent or from littleknown small parties, some of them were even from wellknown parties such as CPI (M) and Trinamool Congress. In almost all these cases, even the number of votes cast for ‘NOTA (None Of The Above) was higher.

Besides, a much larger number of candidates could garner less than 500 votes each.

Going by the total number of candidates in the fray, Manipur accounted for the largest share of the people managing to get less than 100 votes at about 20%, while this ratio was not even 1% in Uttar Pradesh and little higher in Punjab (11 candidates) and at about 10% in Goa.

While more than 4,800 candidates were in the fray in UP, Goa saw over 250 contestants. More than 600 people contested in Uttarakhand and over 1,100 in Punjab.

Nearly 100 persons stood for the election in Manipur.

There are 40 constituencies in Goa, 70 in Uttarakhand and 60 in Manipur, while Punjab has 117 and Uttar Pradesh has 403.

In Goa, more than 20 seats had such candidates including in Dabolim, Panaji, St Andre, St Cruz and Vasco Di Gama.