The vote share of the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections in Madhya Pradesh went down by more than two per cent while that of the BJP increased marginally by over one per cent as compared to the figures in the previous parliamentary elections, a top official said on Wednesday.
In the results of the Lok Sabha polls declared on Tuesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) clinched all 29 seats, including the Congress bastion Chhindwara, in Madhya Pradesh.
A total of 5,33,705 voters pressed the NOTA (none of the above) option, with the highest number of 2,18,674 such votes being registered in Indore seat alone, Madhya Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Anupam Rajan said in a press conference.
A total of 369 candidates were in the fray from the 29 seats, including 343 men, 25 women and one transgender (in Damoh).
Rajan said the Indian National Congress (INC) had got 34.50 per cent vote share in the 2019 elections. But this time, its vote share stood at 32.44 per cent, down by 2.06 per cent.
The BJP bagged 59.28 per cent votes this time as compared to 58 per cent it had received in 2019, he said.
The vote share of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) also went up to 3.28 per cent from 2.38 per cent it registered in the last general elections, he added.
According to Rajan, the vote share of NOTA also went up from 0.92 per cent to 1.40 per cent.
"Of the 5,33,705 NOTA votes received across 29 constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, 2,18,674 votes were polled in Indore Lok Sabha seat alone," he said.
Of the total NOTA votes in Indore Lok Sabha seat, 2,18,355 votes were polled on EVMs and 319 through postal ballots, he said.
He informed that Indore's BJP candidate Shankar Lalwani, who won by the highest margin of 11.75 lakh votes, got 78.54 per cent of the total votes polled.
In the Vidisha seat, former state chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan won by a margin of 8.21 lakh votes. He received 76.70 per cent of the total votes polled.
On the third place in this list, BJP's Lata Wankhede got 68.49 of total votes in the constituency, he said.
BJP's Jyotiraditya Scindia (Guna) and the party' state unit president V D Sharma (Khajuraho) received 67.21 per cent and 67.75 per cent of total votes respectively, the official said.
Across all 29 seats, the lowest victory margin was recorded in the Morena Lok Sabha constituency, where BJP candidate Shivmangal Singh Tomar won by a margin of 52,530 votes, he said.
Responding to a question, Rajan said that EVMs were foolproof and there was no scope of tampering due to procedural checks.
The model code of conduct will come to an end on Thursday, he said.
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