The elections to the House of Representatives and provincial assemblies held on Sunday saw a 61 percent voter turnout across the country, according to the Election Commission.
Addressing a press conference at 7:45 PM Sunday, Chief Election Commissioner Dinesh Kumar Thapaliya said that 61 percent of the total 17,988,570 voters in the country cast their ballots in Sunday’s elections. He said that the percentage was based on the data entered into the Election Commission’s system as of Sunday evening.
Thapaliya said that the turnout was lower than expected.
However, the Election Commission expects the figure to go up after it receives all the data from across the country.
Voters cast their ballots between 7 AM and 5 PM Sunday to elect 165 HoR and 330 provincial assembly members through the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system and another 110 HoR and 220 provincial assembly members through the proportional representation (PR) electoral system.
The HoR and the seven provincial assemblies will elect governments at the center and the seven provinces respectively.
A total of 22,227 polling centers were set up at 10,892 polling stations across the country, according to the Election Commission.
Arrangements were made for the staffers who were deployed for the election to cast their votes through the PR electoral system for the HoR at the polling station they were deployed or at the nearest polling station.
The Election Commission had also set up 141 temporary polling centers in 77 districts across the country for the staffers, security persons, inmates, and people in old age homes whose names are on the voter list but who stay outside their permanent address, according to Chief Election Commissioner Dinesh Kumar Thapaliya.
