Rejected votes outnumber victory margin in five seats

Panaji: The use of ballot papers for the conduct of the zilla panchayat elections saw an unusually high number of invalid votes across the state, with the number of such rejected votes being higher than the winning margin in at least five constituencies.

Constituencies like Rivona (winning margin of 19), Khola (52), Arambol (54), Colva (73), and Sirsaim (79) saw candidates triumph by the skin of their teeth. Had the votes been all valid, the result could have been different.
In Rivona, for example, where BJP’s Rajeshree Gaonkar defeated Sahidnya Gaonkar of GFP by just 19 votes, the returning officer recorded 245 rejected votes. Nine of the 27 booths had rejected votes in double digits, while two postal ballots were also not found to be accurate.

It was no different in Colva, where Anthony Fernandes (AAP) managed to defeat independent Nelly Rodrigues by 73 votes.

There were 122 rejected votes, 31 of them from a single booth at the Holy Family School, Seraulim.


Sirsaim (159), Khola (186), and Rivona (191) also had rejected votes more than the winning margin. At last count, Kavlem had recorded the highest number of rejected votes at 270.

“Probably the switch from electronic voting machines to ballot papers meant not everyone could vote properly,” Goa state election commissioner Menino D’Souza told TOI. “Old people have difficulties in stamping their vote in the exact space (earmarked) on the ballot paper. Many of them are now used to EVMs.”

When voting on paper ballot, the voter must stamp on the selected candidate, and there should not be more than one mark on the ballot paper, or any other mark anywhere on the ballot paper. If any paper has more than one mark anywhere, the vote is considered invalid and taken out of the counting process.

Often, there are disputes between the candidates over the validity of the vote when it’s cast in their favour, with the power of deciding on the validity lying in the hands of the returning officer.

“I saw that for many votes, people had stamped wrongly,” said Fernandes, former Colva sarpanch who has now been elected to the zilla panchayat for the first time. “People have difficulties with ballot papers. It’s a concern for everyone.”

Interestingly, in many constituencies—Sirsaim, Shiroda and Khola, for example—even postal ballots were rejected.



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