The counting of the votes polled in the rural local bodies in 27 districts of Tamil Nadu has begun on Thursday morning as the much delayed and vacant posts in the rural bodies are about to be filled by the elected representatives, whom the people have voted in the two-phased local body elections held on December 27th and 30th, 2019.

The State Election Commission (SEC) has installed 315 counting centers across the districts that hosted the polls and the police personnel had been stationed in the centers as the authorities have been counting the votes registered in the four different colored ballot papers. The two-phased local body polls had seen about 2.31 lakh people who contested for 91,975 posts in the rural local bodies including Gram Panchayat President, Gram Panchayat Ward member, Panchayat Union ward member, and District Panchayat Union Ward member posts.

The counting has been rolled out as scheduled earlier and it has spurred the heat between the state political parties as they have been eyeing to register their victories in the rural bodies to cement their base and stronghold in the Panchayats as the state would be hosting the legislative elections in 2021 and the reports say that the DMK party has been leading across the rural bodies while the ruling party trails.  Both phases of the polls had seen good turnouts of the votes as the state election commission has revealed that the first phase recorded with 76.19 percent while the second one concluded with 77.73 percent of the votes polled.

On December 6th, 2019 the Supreme court had directed the state election commission conduct the local body polls across the state except for the nine districts and the court has awarded the State Election Commission with four months to complete the delimitation of wards and reservation of seats in the nine new districts. 

Recently, the state government of Tamil Nadu had created five new districts from four big districts - Kallakurichi from Villupuram, Tenkasi from Tirunelveli, Chengalpattu from Kancheepuram and Tirupattur, Ranipet from Vellore and these nine districts won't go for the local body polls at any of the phase since the delimitation of the wards and reservations in these districts had not been conducted so far.