Lok Sabha poll 2024 schedule to be announced today

 The Election Commission of India will also announce key dates for State Assembly elections

The term of the present Lok Sabha ends on June 16 and a new House has to be constituted before that.

PTI. |  New Delhi | Mar 15, 2024 :  The Election Commission will announce the schedule for the Lok Sabha polls on Saturday.

    

In a post on X, the poll panel said a press conference to announce the schedule for Lok Sabha elections and some state assemblies will be held at 3 pm on Saturday.

The term of the present Lok Sabha ends on June 16 and a new House has to be constituted before that.

The term of the assemblies in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Odisha is coming to an end on various dates in June.

Last time the Lok Sabha polls were announced on March 10 and held in seven phases beginning April 11. Votes were counted on May 23.

In 2014 also, the EC had sent invites for its poll schedule press conference a day in advance. The invite was sent in the evening for the presser to be held early next day.

Nearly 97 crore people are eligible to cast vote in the upcoming polls at over 12 lakh polling stations.

In the last parliamentary polls, the BJP had won 303 seats while the Congress got 52 seats. It could not muster enough numbers to claim the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.

The 2024 parliamentary polls are being seen as a do or die battle for the opposition INDIA bloc.

According to a News 18 opinion poll, the BJP-led NDA is headed for a "historic mandate" in the upcoming pols.

The opinion poll claimed that the NDA is set to win 411 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha with the BJP alone clinching a record 350 seats.

According to an opinion poll survey by ABP-CVoter, the NDA is projected to secure a commanding lead with a vote share of 45.9 per cent and an estimated 366 seats in the Lok Sabha.

The INDIA bloc together, including the UPA, is expected to claim a 39 per cent vote share and 156 seats, according to the opinion poll.

It suggests a considerable swing in votes since the 2019 Lok Sabha results, with the BJP seeing a positive swing of 3.08 per cent, and the INDIA bloc (UPA in 2019) a rise of 2.5 per cent.

Meanwhile, newly appointed election commissioners Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu assumed charge on Friday. The former bureaucrats were appointed as election commissioners on Thursday. 

They are the first ones to have been appointed as members of the poll panel after the new law on appointment of Chief Election Commissioner(CEC) and ECs came into force recently. Welcoming them, CEC Rajiv Kumar spoke about the significance of their joining at a historic point when the Election Commission is all set to conduct Lok Sabha elections, a spokesperson said.

The vacancies had come up in the Election Commission after the retirement of Anup Chandra Pandey on February 14 and the sudden resignation of Arun Goel on March 8.Gyanesh Kumar and Sandhu, both1988-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, belonged to the Kerala and Uttarakhand cadres, respectively.