A total of 740 Members of Parliament cast their vote in the Vice Presidential election today, which the UPA Presidential nominee Hamid Ansari won handily against NDA's Jaswant Singh.
47 out of the total 787 MPs in both Houses did not cast their votes in the VP poll, including ailing Union Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh who is admitted in a Chennai Hospital.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal said 21 members from BJD, 11 from TDP, 6 from Congress and supporting parties, including Deshmukh, and two nominated members did not cast their votes.
Others who did not vote include 2 each from BJP, AGP, RSP and TRS and Y S Jaganmohan Reddy, one of the two members of YSR Congress.
BJP members Shatrughan Sinha was sick while Dilip Singh Judev could not come as his mother was not well. Trinamool Congress members Kakoli Dastidar and Kabir Suman were abroad. So was SP member Brij Bhushan Singh.
Out of the total 790 members of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha that form the electoral college for Vice Presidential election, 3 are vacant with Pranab Mukherjee becoming President, Vijay Bahuguna Chief Minister of Uttarakhand and the election of BJP MP J Shanta having been set aside by a High Court.
Brisk polling was witnessed with 600 electors casting their votes by 1:00 PM. After polling began at 10:00 AM.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were among early voters. BJP leaders L K Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Murli Manohar Joshi, BSP supremo Mayawati and SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav cast their ballots before noon.
BJD, TDP and RSP had declared that they would abstain from voting. The three parties together have 34 members in both Houses of Parliament.
With the total number of voting members reduced to 752, the halfway mark for Ansari has become 377. UPA managers claim to have the declared support of nearly 500 members.
74-year-old Singh, a former Minister of External Affairs and Finance, has the support of NDA and AIADMK.
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