Chapter 28

Summary

Once the election was over, the priority of the Commission was to protect the will of the people, expressed through the ballot, and to complete the count and announce the results as soon as possible.

When the polling finished, the ballot boxes were taken—under tight security—to the headquarters of the 75 districts. In addition to the formal counting legislation, the Commission developed guidelines to assist the process. In rural areas, where literacy was low, it was necessary to be flexible, in order to reduce the number of votes which might otherwise be deemed invalid on technical grounds.

The first count began in Kathmandu-1, the only constituency using electronic voting machines. Two candidates in this constituency, Prakash Man Singh of the Nepali Congress and Pradip Nepal of the Unified Marxist Leninist party, were considered to be equally strong. Singh was from dominant Newar community and the son of the veteran democracy fighter Ganesh Man Singh. Nepal was a sitting minister and a senior UML leader. He appeared to be in a good position, as the UML had won five of the seven constituencies in Kathmandu in the last election in 1999.

The competition was tough. The counting of votes for Kathmandu-1 finally ended the next morning, when Singh was declared the first candidate to win in the historic Constituent Assembly election. The UML party came second and the Maoist party third, in both the FPTP and proportional race of Kathmandu-1.