TIRUCHY: AIADMK candidate M Paranjothi on Thursday defeated his nearest DMK rival and three-time minister K N Nehru by a thumping margin of 14,684 votes in the Tiruchy West by-election. This is more than double that of the difference in this year’s Assembly elections.Paranjothi secured 69,029 votes, while Nehru got 54,345 votes after 18 rounds of counting that concluded here on Thursday afternoon. Right from the first round, Paranjothi’s votes were more than that of the DMK’s ‘star’ candidate. During the first round of counting, Paranjothi polled 3,886, while Nehru garnered 3,397 and the margin was 589. At the ninth round, there was a technical snag in two electronic voting machines (EVM) and they were left for the final round.However, BEL engineer Venkatraj, who was present at the counting centre, rectified the anomaly, after which, the counting went on smoothly.The margin of difference increased steadily in all the rounds except the 12th round when Nehru got 219 votes more than Paranjothi. The overall tally after this round stood at 44,200 for Paranjothi and 35,471 for Nehru. After the final round of counting, Paranjothi, who secured 69,029 votes, was declared the winner and Nehru could secure only 54,345 votes, about 16,000 votes less than that secured during the previous poll.Returning Officer K Sampath distributed the winning certificate to Paranjothi, in the presence of minister N R Sivapathi, member of Parliament P Kumar and MLA R Manoharan.It may be recalled that the bypoll was necessitated owing to the death of the AIADMK’s Mariyam Pitchai in a road accident, a week after his swearing-in as minister for Environment.
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