Five days after Tamil Nadu election, ECI yet to release final poll numbers

CHENNAI: While the Election Commission of India (ECI) released Bihar's Assembly poll percentages within 24 hours last year, Tamil Nadu's political parties are still waiting for final turnout figures, five days after voting.

The election was held on April 23 for 234 assembly segments in the state. It witnessed brisk polling from 7am in a four-cornered contest, and the turnout reached 85.15% by the end of the day. Two days later, the Commission made corrections after re-verification, bringing the provisional voting percentage down to 85.10%, a decline of 0.05%. Authorities, however, have not yet released the gender-wise breakup (men, women and third gender) or disclosed the absolute numbers.



The two Dravidian majors, DMK and AIADMK, which have been contesting elections for decades, managed to obtain Form 17C to gain better clarity on their winning prospects at the booth and constituency levels. New entrants such as actor Vijay's TVK and Seeman's NTK have found it difficult to match the expertise of the Dravidian majors and are still awaiting final reports, excluding postal and service votes.

ECI officials said they would release the final report on counting day. "We will be collecting postal votes until 8am on counting day (May 4), so we cannot provide a complete report until then. We have updated the polling percentage on our portal. If there is a change, it will be marginal, possibly around 1%, as there are approximately six lakh postal votes," said a senior ECI official.

Asked how the Commission managed to publish the voting percentage, including the gender breakup, on polling day in Bihar in Nov 2025, the officer declined to comment. Bihar election was held in two phases on Nov 6 and 11. On both occasions, the Commission published the EVM vote counts by 11pm the day of polling.

"We have been asking the authorities to provide complete data, but they have been dodging us by stating they are re-verifying the numbers to ensure accuracy," said DMK organizational secretary R S Bharathi, adding that the party would approach the courts if they found any anomalies in the data.

AIADMK leader and Rajya Sabha MP I S Inbadurai said while the party's booth agents have collected data from their respective booths, they have yet to receive the complete official figures.
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