The election commission has made elaborate arrangements for the smooth and hassle free counting of votes in all 13 district headquarters. The counting process would start at 8 am on Thursday with counting of postal ballots and all the results are expected to be released by evening.

For counting of 4775517 votes in all five Lok Sabha constituencies, the EC has made arrangements in 13 counting centres where counting process would be conducted on 862 tables.

The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Sowjanya said that elaborate security arrangements have been made in all counting centres. She said mobile phones, laptops and any other electronic device would not be allowed inside the counting centres.

The CEO further informed that the commission has so far received about 83000 postal ballots and they would be accepted till 7.59 am on Thursday.

The commission had sent a total of 115474 postal ballots out of which 90845 were service voters and 24629 were the ballots given to the employees deployed on election duty.

She informed that the service votes would be counted on 125 tables in Pauri district as maximum number of such voters are in this constituency. Similarly in Almora- Pithoragarh parliamentary constituency, 100 tables have been deployed for counting these votes.

In Nainital- Udham Singh Nagar service votes would be counted on 90 tables while in Tehri and Haridwar 58 and 32 tables respectively would be deployed to count these votes.

The commission has deployed 2586 employees for counting the votes of EVMs similarly 1220 personnel would count the postal ballots. For security in and around counting centres, the commission has deployed nine companies of Central Reserve Police Force ( CRPF) and 35 companies of state armed police.

In addition 14000 personnel of Uttarakhand police would be stationed around the counting centres.

In compliance of the Supreme Court ( SC) ruling on the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail ( VVPAT), the commission would randomly select five VVPATs from every assembly segment and match the paper slips with the electronic display of the machines.

The CEO said that this process would be done after the counting of the EVMs.In Uttarakhand every parliamentary constituency has 13 assembly segments which mean in every constituency 65 VVPATs would be randomly picked for matching the paper slips with the displayed data of the machine. This practice would cause some delay in declaration of the results.