Bhubaneswar: The counting of votes for the four Rajya Sabha seats from Odisha reached a dramatic climax on Monday with the battle for the crucial fourth seat turning into a nail-biting tie between the two contenders.
According to sources, BJP-backed Independent candidate Dilip Ray and Dr Datteswar Hota, whom the BJD fielded as a common candidate with support from Congress and CPM, were tied with 23 first-preference votes each.
As per the latest first-preference vote tally emerging from the Odisha Assembly:
>> Manmohan Samal (BJP state president): 35 votes
>> Sujit Kumar (sitting BJP Rajya Sabha member): 35 votes
>> Santrupt Misra (BJD nominee): 31 votes
>> Dilip Ray (BJP-backed Independent, former Union minister): 23 votes
>> Dr. Datteswar Hota (eminent urologist, BJD-supported common candidate backed by Congress and CPI(M)): 23 votes
The first three candidates — Samal, Kumar, and Misra — are on track to secure their seats comfortably, aligning with the pre-poll arithmetic where the BJP with around 82 MLAs including three Independents was poised to claim two seats, and the BJD one. The real suspense surrounds the fourth seat, where Ray and Hota are deadlocked at 23 first-preference votes each. Neither reached the quota (typically around 30 votes in Odisha’s 147-member Assembly, based on the single transferable vote system), pushing the process into the second-preference votes.