Minister Karki demands recounting votes

Minister for Communications and Nepali Congress (NC) candidate for House of Representatives member from Sunsari constituency no 4, Gyanendra Bahadur Karki, has demanded recounting of votes.

The vote counting halted since Saturday noon was supposed to resume after all-party meeting on Sunday but to no avail.

The all-party meeting failed to reach consensus after which Karki submitted an application letter in the Election Commission today for recounting of votes.

Dispute arose after 606 more voters were found than the actual vote turnout for Jagadish Prasad Kushiyat, the CPN-UML candidate contesting from the same constituency.

NC had expressed concern when 1,212 votes were registered in the Election Commission while the election officer made public only 606 votes.

The Commission, admitted its mistake in tallying the votes, then proposed to remove those mistakenly added votes and resume the vote count.

NC candidate Karki refused the proposal of the Commission and insisted on recounting the votes from the beginning.

The vote count so far has shown that Karki had collected 23,439 votes while Kushiyat 23,341 votes.