KATHMANDU, JULY 30: The Supreme Court (SC) on Sunday quashed a writ petition which was lodged by demanding to scrap the decision of the Election Commission (EC) for the re-polling in Bharatpur Metropolitan City-19.

After a long hearing and pleading on the case, a division bench of Justices Om Prakash Mishra and Purushottam Bhandari approved the EC’s decision to hold the re-poll.

The verdict has said that the EC has the constitutional responsibility to hold the elections in a free and fair manner.

However, the SC has also directed the EC to adopt special measures now onwards for security by becoming conscious to its responsibility.

The EC had decided to go for re-polling in the Bharatpur-19 on June 30.

However, UML candidate of Ward No. 19 Gunja Man BK and advocate Tulsi Pandey had filed a writ petition at the SC by challenging EC’s decision.

The verdict further stated that the decision of the Election Commission to invalidate all ballots of Ward No 19 and cancel the voting based on chief election officer’s report and the investigative report of the monitoring team had come as per the law.

Similarly, the SC issued the order in the name of EC to keep on the counting of the remaining votes.

The vote counting was postponed after the cadres of the CPN (Maoist-Centre) tore 90 ballot papers when there was cut throat competition between the CPN-UML and the Maoist Centre candidates in the vote counting of Ward No 19 under the second round of local level elections.

The SC delivered final verdict on Sunday after six rounds of hearing. RSS