Thiruvananthapuram: A rise in the number of postal votes this time will reportedly further delay the final result announcement for the 140-seat Kerala Assembly Elections held last month. The vote counting will start at 7.30 on Sunday.
As compared to the 2016 assembly polls, there are over 4.54 lakh postal votes this time.
Incidentally, this is 3.5 lakhs more than the 2016 polls.
For the first time, people over 80 years of age were allowed to use the postal ballot facility in this election, considering the worsening COVID conditions in the state.;
Nearly 2.97 lakhs of people were said to have exercised their franchise through this facility and the remaining postal votes are those of election officials.
Moreover, time is still there for postal votes to be returned and can happen till 7 AM Sunday morning.
Incidentally in the last year's Bihar assembly elections, even though there were 2.5 lakh postal votes, the results got delayed and came in the evening, so Kerala with almost double that number, the suspense could well be delayed.