Awami League-nominated mayoral candidate Arfanul Haque Rifat has won Cumilla City Corporation elections by a narrow margin of only 343 votes.
He bagged 50,310 votes while expelled BNP leader Monirul Haque Sakku got 49,967 votes, reports bdnews24.com.
Nizam Uddin Kaiser, another expelled BNP leader, polled 29099, according to the results published by Returning Officer Shahedunnabi Chowdhury from the district’s Shilpakala Academy on Wednesday evening after the daylong voting ended without any major incident.
The voting was held through electronic machines, but the results were delayed as rains stopped some presiding officers from travelling and reporting to the returning officer, Shahedunnabi said.
Tension mounted just before Rifat was declared winner as Sakku arrived in the control room around 9 pm with hundreds of supporters of the ruling party candidate shouting: “boat, boat”, the electoral symbol of the Awami League.
Police later intervened in a bid to clear the supporters from the building. The returning officer stopped the announcement of results for some time amid chaos at that time as police charged with batons.
Five candidates vied for the position of mayor while 106 were in the race for councillor posts and 36 for reserved posts in the election.
Sakku joined the race this year as an independent candidate after his expulsion from the opposition BNP, which says it will not take part in any election under the Sheikh Hasina administration. Kaiser also stood as an independent candidate after his expulsion from the BNP.
Both of them complained about “difficulties” in casting votes through electronic machines.
"We’ve found no disruptions or irregularities during the election. No allegation of obstruction to voter turning up was reported to us. The polls have proven that people's interest in casting ballots has increased," said Mohammad Abed Ali, chairman of the Election Monitoring Forum.
Abed said pre-election campaigns were not enough to introduce the EVM method to general voters. Many of them had to try a couple of times or more before being able to cast their ballots through EVMs.
The Election Commission has expressed satisfaction over the voting in Cumilla following their monitoring through CCTV cameras.
