Exit polls predicted a handsome victory for the BJP in the civic election of Delhi, giving them more than 200 of the 270 seats for which voting was held today.
The overall turnout, at 54 per cent, was almost the same as the 2012 elections, when 53.9 per cent polling was recorded. The rival parties pegged the election as a report card of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s two-year-old Aam Aadmi Party government. The AAP and the Congress are hoping to wrest power from the BJP, which dominated the Municipal Corporation of Delhi for a decade. The BJP, in the hope of a third term, held a high-voltage campaign in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi had led senior party leaders and Union ministers including Amit Shah, Smriti Irani and Rajnath Singh in seeking votes.
The average of two exit polls gave the BJP 216 seats, AAP 25 seats and the Congress 26 seats. The India Today-Axis exit poll predicted that the BJP may bag anything between 202 and 220 seats, while AAP and the Congress will score something around 23-35 and 19-31 seats. The CVoter-ABP exit poll claimed the BJP was likely to sweep Delhi with 218 seats, limiting the AAP and the Congress to 24 and 22 seats.
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal alleged reports of EVM malfunctioning were coming from all over the Capital. “Reports from all over Delhi of EVM malfunction, people wid voter slips not allowed to vote. What is SEC doing?” he tweeted. Amid the allegations of EVM tampering by Mr Kejriwal in the run-up to the MCD elections, the Election Commission said it has provided Generation-1 EVMs for the polls, describing them as “foolproof”.