Through this polling season, we have covered the most important stories, the most interesting commentary and the most entertaining memes. To help guide you through counting day, we put together this blog that will help you follow what’s happening across the country.
We also have other ways to pay attention to results: Our heartland tracker pays attention to the handful of states from which the BJP won the majority of its seats in 2014, the South Focus looks at politics beyond the Vindhyas, East Focus takes you to the battleground states of West Bengal and Odiasha and Key Fights tracks the 20 most interesting races.
Here on the Election Fix liveblog, however, we’ll try and give you context, insight and links to what you should be paying attention to as numbers come in. We’ll be in conversation with our reporters, who covered the election from around the country, and hope to surface the most important information at any given moment.
8:41 am
Arunabh Saikia writes in from Guwahati where he is keeping an eye on all the North East states. The Mizo National Front has taken the first official lead, as per the Election Commission website. Until recently, the Mizoram party was a part of the BJP’s alliance, the NDA, but the saffron party is contesting by itself too.
8:38 am
Rohan V
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA is far ahead of everyone else in early leads according to NDTV. The NDA has leads in 160 seats, compared to just 62 for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and 63 for the rest.
8:32 am
In 2014, on counting day, the Indian Express went with the excellent ‘Headline Awaited’ as its lead headline. Today’s headline is ‘How many?’
8:26 am
Rohan V
Over the last ten Sundays, along with Nithya Subramanian and a number of Scroll.in’s reporters, we looked at some of the key policy questions and themes of these elections. In this piece, we put together 10 challenges that the next prime minister will face, regardless of who wins the election.
8:19 am:
Rohan V
We already have early leads from a number of places. CNN-News18 shows 42 leads to the NDA and 19 to the UPA, with 8 going to others. A total of 542 seats are up for grabs. Normally 543 seats go to the polls but the Election Commission cancelled polling in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, after it seized a huge amount of cash in the constituency.
8:14 am:
Rohan V
We’ll also be keeping an eye on how the media is covering counting day. Senthalir S writes in from Tamil Nadu, where PTTV has an animated avatar of Narendra Modi doing the twist.
8:08 am
Supriya S:
So finally counting has started. It’s likely to be quite slow with the VVPAT slips being tallied in five polling booth per constituency. Remember how long the state assembly polls counting dragged in December? But my sense is the big picture will become clear early in the day, with only a few states close to call. This doesn’t look like a national cliffhanger, to be honest.
8 am
Rohan V:
Counting has begun. EVMs will be turned online across the country, with numbers being delivered to us round by round. You can expect to hear about “leads” for much of the next few hours. This is when we learn just who has more votes than the other party, although things can change dramatically everytime a new round is counted. Traditionally, one expects to know who has won by the afternoon, but the inclusion of VVPAT counting this time means it might take longer.
7:45 am
Rohan V:
Elections began way back on April 11 and continued, over 7 phases, through May 19. That evening, we also got the exit polls, which almost uniformly said that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance would comfortably return to power.
7:30 am
Rohan V:
Good morning and welcome to the Election Fix liveblog. We’re hoping to pull out the most important context, commentary and information for you, in conversation with Scroll.in’s reporters, on this liveblog.
To start off with, you could go back over previous issues of the Election Fix, our poll-season newsletter, that picked out the most important information for you over the last two months.