Six byelection seats close above 76 percent, with the count on Friday

Polling closed on Tuesday in six byelections, and the final turnout figures put every seat above 76 percent. Amar Ujala's desk, updating at 7:20 p.m., listed Nagaon Lok Sabha in Assam at 76.16 percent, Thattanchavady in Puducherry at 80.81, Madurantakam in Tamil Nadu at 85.98, Dharapuram in Tamil Nadu at 80.30, Rejinagar in West Bengal at 79.90, and Nandigram in West Bengal at 80.69.

Counting is on 9 October. The seats fell vacant because winners who had stood in two places resigned from one. Tuesday's vote is the replacement, not a general election. The turnout is still the number that decides whether the resignation seats are being treated as routine.

Madurantakam is the high. 85.98 percent on an assembly seat is a heavy poll for a byelection. Dharapuram at 80.30 and Thattanchavady at 80.81 sit in the same band. The two Bengal seats, Nandigram and Rejinagar, finished within a point of each other, 80.69 and 79.90. Nagaon, the only Lok Sabha seat in the set, is the low at 76.16, and it is still a high figure for a parliamentary byelection.

Nagaon has 19,02,009 voters on the roll used for this poll, and a three-way fight among Devashish Sharma, Badruddin Ajmal and Sibamani Bora. A 76.16 percent turnout on that roll is about 14.5 lakh ballots, before rejected votes. The exact valid count waits for the returning officer. The percentage is what the evening bulletin gave.

Nandigram is the seat with the longest recent argument. It has been a test of the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party in rural Purba Medinipur. An 80.69 percent close means the booths filled. It does not say which party filled them. The count on Friday is the first time that split becomes a number.

The Election Commission has not, in the evening reports, flagged a repoll. A turnout table without a repoll line is a clean close. Candidates will still file complaints. Those complaints are not in the percentage table.

Tuesday's schedule covered three states and one Union Territory. West Bengal had two assembly seats, Tamil Nadu two, Puducherry one, and Assam the Lok Sabha seat. Voting had opened at 7 a.m. The final percentages arrived after the close, which is why a morning piece on the opening and an evening piece on the turnout are not the same story.

What a reader can use before Friday is the spread. The lowest listed seat is 76.16. The highest is 85.98. Five of the six finished at 79.90 or above. A byelection set that clusters in the 80s is a high-engagement poll, whatever the party split turns out to be on 9 October.

The names on the Nagaon ballot are the ones already filed: Sharma, Ajmal, Bora. The other five seats have their own slates, and the evening bulletin did not revise them. Friday's count will pair each slate with a turnout that is now fixed. Until then the only new official-facing number is the percentage column Amar Ujala published at 7:20 p.m.

A shock recorded by the National Center for Seismology at 04:23 IST, magnitude 4.5, epicentre in Nagaon district, did not appear in the turnout bulletin as a disruption. The poll file and the seismology file are separate. The poll file closed with 76.16 percent in Nagaon and a Friday count.

The spread of four points between Nagaon and Madurantakam is the comparison that survives a complaint. A parliamentary seat and an assembly seat are different rolls, and a higher percentage on a smaller roll is not more ballots. It is a higher share of the people who were on the list. Madurantakam's 85.98 is that share. Nagaon's 76.16 is the other. Friday will show whether the higher share produced a clearer margin.

Thattanchavady at 80.81 is the only Union Territory seat in the set. Puducherry's assembly politics turn on small margins and on the lieutenant governor's file as much as on the booth. An 80 percent poll does not change that structure. It does mean the seat was not ignored. Dharapuram at 80.30 sits with it, in a state where assembly byelections have recently been read as tests of the Dravidian parties rather than as local vacancies.

Rejinagar at 79.90 completes the Bengal pair. Two seats, both near 80, both counting on the same Friday as Nandigram. A reader who wants a single number for the day can use the floor: no seat in the evening table finished under 76. The ceiling is Madurantakam. The count that changes the politics is still three days away.