President Election 2022: Counting of votes to start at 11 am

India on Thursday (July 21, 2022) will know who will become the country's 15th President, as the counting of votes for the presidential poll begins in New Delhi. The ballot boxes from all states reached the Parliament House on Tuesday and the poll officials will begin counting at 11 am. Rajya Sabha Secretary General PC Mody, the Chief Returning Officer for the election, will oversee the counting and the result is expected to be declared around 4 pm today.

Meanwhile, the BJP is making elaborate preparations to celebrate the victory of Droupadi Mumu, who is expected to far outstrip the opposition's Yashwant Sinha.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit Murmu at her temporary lodgings in Teen Murti Marg and congratulate her after the election results are declared, sources said.

The Delhi BJP has planned a roadshow after MMurmu's victory from the party headquarters to Rajpath. Many senior leaders will be present on the occasion, sources said.

All state units of the BJP have also planned victory processions, which will be taken out after the announcement of the results.

The residents in Odisha's Rairangpur, the hometown of Murmu, are also ready to celebrate with 20,000 sweets prepared. A tribal dance and victory procession has also been planned.

The NDA choice of Murmu -- a tribal woman from Odisha and a former Jharkhand Governor -- is seen as a move calculated to split the opposition and bring support from non-aligned parties like Naveen Patnaik's Biju Janata Dal and the Jaganmohan Reddy's YSR Congress.

Altogether, 34 parties declared support for the Opposition candidate, former Union minister Yashwant Sinha and 44 for Droupadi Murmu, the former Governor of Jharkhand. But several MLAs have confessed to cross-voting in favour of Murmu.

The counting of votes will be preceded by sorting, in which votes of MPs and MLAs will be separated. The value of the vote of each MP is fixed at 700, while the value of the vote of MLAs from each state is different.

The winner of the Presidential election is not the candidate who gets the most votes, but the one who gets more votes than a certain quota. The quota is determined by adding the votes polled for each candidate, dividing the sum by two, and adding '1' to it. The candidate who gets more votes than this value is the winner.

The President-elect will take oath on July 25.