Nearly 60% of the nominations filed for the elections to the Jubilee Hills Assembly constituency stood rejected after a lengthy session of scrutiny that had started on Wednesday and lasted till the early hours of Thursday. The rejections have invalidated the candidature of over 61% of the aspirants, bringing the number of contestants drastically down.

Of the total 321 nominations filed before the deadline, 186 have been rejected, leaving only 135 valid nominations. This has left 81 candidates in the fray, of the total 211 who filed their nominations. The remaining 130 candidates have been rejected owing to flaws in their nominations.

Election officials informed that the nominations could be rejected for as simple a mistake as leaving out a column blank instead of mentioning 'Not Applicable' or putting down a simple hyphen. Rejections could also be due to insufficient number of proposers or proposers supporting more than one candidate.

"A large number of candidates filed their nominations on the last day and in the last minute, which is also one reason why the papers could have been incomplete," an official said.

Of the 321 nominations by 211 candidates, 194 nominations by 117 candidates were filed on the last day. Majority of these were promoted by pressure groups pertaining to the displaced of the Regional Ring Road project, protesters against Pharma City project, unemployed youth and retired employees who have not received their retirement benefits. The nominations of the major contenders, V. Naveen Yadav from Congress, Maganti Sunitha from Bharat Rashtra Samithi, and Lankala Deepak Reddy from Bharatiya Janata Party have been accepted. Of the total, 30 were filed by recognised political parties, while the rest were by independents.

October 24, Friday, is the last date for withdrawal of nominations, after which the number of candidates could further go down. On Thursday, there were no withdrawals.

If there are no withdrawals on Friday too, the number of control units will be two instead of one in each polling booth. Each control unit can support a maximum of four electronic voting machines (EVMs), and each EVM can display the names of 16 candidates. Added with NOTA, if the number of options exceeds 64, a second control unit will be needed with one or two more EVMs attached to it depending on the number.

Jubilee Hills bypoll: Nominations of over 60% candidates rejected