Voting for third phase of Jammu and Kashmir polls underway; trend of low voter turnout continues.

Jammu: The voting for the third phase of the urban local body elections in Jammu and Kashmir began on Saturday amid a thick security blanket around the polling stations. The security forces have been carrying out area domination exercises over the past couple of days for ensuring incident-free election, according to officials. Although 207 wards in the state were scheduled to go to polls in the third phase, polling will be held only in 96 wards — 56 in Samba district in Jammu division and 40 in the Valley.

Though election authorities have made arrangements for the polls there is little hope of any change in the trend of low voter turnout in the Valley as most of the wards fall in the separatist hotbed of the downtown city and south Kashmir. 

The voter turnout, however, is expected to be high in 13 wards in the Uri area of north Kashmir’s Baramulla district, which has traditionally been a high polling area. A similar trend might be seen in seven wards in the Mattan area of Anantnag district, which has a significant Kashmiri migrant population. While results for 49 wards in the Valley were declared uncontested at the completion of the nomination process on October 3, there were no nominations filed for 62 wards — mostly falling in Pulwama and Anantnag district of south Kashmir.

The voter turnout in the first two phases of the civic polls in the Valley has been low. While 8.3 per cent of the electorate turned up to vote in the 83 wards in the first phase on October 8, the poll percentage fell to an abysmal 3.4 per cent in the second phase held on October 10. 

Here are the latest updates:

# Heavy polling is going on in Uri municipal committee of Baramulla district where 908 of the 3,552 voters have already cast their votes. The poll percentage in the first three hours of polling was 25.6 per cent. There are 365 candidates in the fray for 96 wards of eight urban local bodies for the third phase comprising a total electorate of 1,93,990 electors.

# The trend of low voter turnout continued in the ongoing civic polls in Kashmir continued Saturday as only 1.3 per cent of the 1.62 lakh electorate exercised their franchise in the first three hours of polling. The 20 wards of Srinagar Municipal Corporation, where voting is underway, have witnessed only 0.8 per cent of the 1.53 lakh voters turn up at the polling stations, officials said. In Anantnag district, only 100 of the 5,469 votes have been polled in the first three hours of polling, the officials said.

# A total of 365 candidates are in the fray for 96 wards of eight urban local bodies comprising 193,990 electors.

# Independent Candidate and former National Conference (NC) leader Junaid Azim Mattu who resigned from NC disagreeing over dthe ecision to boycott local body polls, casts his vote in Srinagar’s Barzulla. “High time some people get off the moral high horse, anybody who disagrees with the two regional parties is labelled a BJP puppet by them. The fact is both NC and PDP have been in alliance with BJP before. So it is hilarious,” said Mattu.