Coimbatore has clocked the highest turnout among 20 municipal corporations in the urban local bodies elections, barring Chennai.
The western city, one of the major textile centres in the country, witnessed about 8.39 lakh casting their votes on Saturday out of the total electorate of 15.65 lakh, the poll data reveal.
Madurai in the south and Salem in the west occupied the second and third slots with approximately 7.26 lakh and 4.7 lakh electors exercising their franchise.
Tiruchi, despite having more number of electors (nearly 7.8 lakh) than Salem (7.3 lakh), fell into the fourth place (4.46 lakh). Against Salem’s figure of 64.35%, Tiruchi registered only 57.25%. Tiruppur occupied the fifth slot with about four lakh voters having turned up at the booths.
Tambaram, one of the newly formed municipal corporations, saw the participation of around 3.89 lakh voters, followed by Vellore with 2.71 lakh, Erode with 2.7 lakh and Tirunelveli with 2.66 lakh. The local bodies whose turnout ranged from 1.5 lakh to 2 lakh were Thoothukudi (1.93 lakh), Avadi (1.85 lakh) and Nagercoil (1.51 lakh).
In terms of the proportion of turnout to the total number of voters, Karur was the first with 75.84%, but, in terms of absolute figures, its tally was about 1.42 lakh. Two municipal corporations that were quite close to Karur were Kancheepuram and Hosur with 1.42 lakh each. Thanjavur in the central region and Dindigul in the south registered the turnout of around 1.20 lakh and 1.17 lakh respectively. Those with five-digit figures were Cuddalore (around 98,345); Kumbakonam (83,895); and Sivakasi (75,675).
As for 489 town panchayats having 7,605 wards that went to the polls, Kanniyakumari district topped the list with about 4.64 lakh persons casting their votes spread over 51 town panchayats. It was followed by Coimbatore with around 3.56 lakh votes polled in 33 town panchayats and Erode with 3.14 lakh votes polled in 42 town panchayats. The total number of votes polled in the town panchayats spread across 37 districts was 44.4 lakh.
