NC vote counting to take a week

KATHMANDU, March 10: With vote counting  for the election of Nepali Congress (NC) Central Working Committee candidates proceeding at snail pace, the whole process is expected to take a week.

The vote counting started on Wednesday but the election committee has managed to count only 400 votes  as of Thursday. The election committee claims that the counting has become prolonged because of the large size of the ballot paper, with 90 aspirants contesting 25 seats in the open category. As of Thursday, the result is out only for a single seat out of the 61 Central Committee posts.

With 400 votes counted, 14 from the Deuba panel and 11 from the Paudel panel are in the lead to be among the top 25 candidates. Khum Bahadur Khadka has secured the most votes among them.

Farmullah Mansoor from the Deuba panel has been elected as Central Committee member under the Muslim reservation quota. Mansoor secured 1,226 votes against 1,044 votes for his nearest rival Aftab Alam from the  Paudel panel. Altogether six candidates are in fray under the quota.

Election committee member Gopal Krishna Ghimire said that it will take a week still to count all the votes because of the large number of candidates.

He said the results for other reservation quotas will start emerging from Saturday.

The election committee has decided to start counting votes under all reservation quotas from Friday. Earlier, voting counting had been underway only for the open category and the Dalit reservation quota.

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