Kathmandu: Officials began counting votes in Nepal on Thursday after millions of voters turned out for the country’s first local elections in two decades.
Election Commission spokesman Surya Prasad Sharma said counting had started in several districts of the three provinces where polls were held on Wednesday.
“Counting has begun in 168 counting centres (out of a total 334 centres),” he said adding that helicopters had flown in to remote villages to collect ballot boxes.
“We will finish collecting ballot boxes from all polling centres by the end of the day,” he said adding that it would take seven days for final results to be available.
The Election Commission said voter turnout for Wednesday’s election was 70.5 per cent. Nepal’s two ruling parties — the Nepali Congress and the Maoists — along with the opposition Unified Marxist-Leninist party, are the main contenders in the elections.
The polls had been delayed while Nepal faced a 10-year Maoist insurgency that ended in 2006, followed by a lengthy peace process. Local elections became possible only after the delivery of a constitution in 2015.
Meanwhile, millions of Nepalis voted on Wednesday in the country’s first local elections for two decades, a key step in its post-war transformation from a feudal monarchy to a federal democracy.
The elections began last month in other parts of the nation but were repeatedly delayed in the southern plains, which were shaken two years ago by deadly ethnic protests.
The government had deployed troops and sealed the border with India, fearing violence in Wednesday’s second phase of voting, which covered around half the country of 26 million people, including large swathes of the south.
As preliminary data trickled in, the Election Commission estimated 70.5 per cent of eligible voters had turned out to cast their ballot.
“The second phase of the local election... has concluded peacefully and with overwhelming participation of voters,” chief election commissioner Ayodhee Prasad Yadav told reporters.
Police said a small bomb exploded in the west of the country, but there were no casualties and the polls passed off broadly peacefully.
The local elections are supposed to be the final step in the peace deal that ended a 10-year civil war in 2006.
Since then the country has suffered persistent instability, cycling through nine governments in a decade.
The government had repeatedly postponed the polls in the south due to objections from the local Madhesi ethnic minority, who say federal boundaries laid out in a new national constitution will leave them under-represented in parliament.
The Rastriya Janata Party-Nepal (RPJ-N), the main party representing the Madhesi community, has said it will boycott Wednesday’s phase, raising doubts about the legitimacy of the vote. — Agencies
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