By Admin 
Voting is being held in Nepal today on Thursday (5 March) to elect the new government. This general election is the first to be held in the country after the violent youth-led protests in September 2025, which led to the fall of the government. Since then, an interim government is running in this Himalayan country under the leadership of former Chief Justice Sushila Karki.
According to the BBC report, Nepal’s Election Commission has promised to release the results of 165 seats directly within 24 hours of the start of counting, but it takes at least a day to collect the ballot boxes from the hilly areas and bring them to the counting centres. Officials said that counting of voting results may take 2 to 3 more days. In such a situation, if the Election Commission fulfills its promise, it will be very different from the normal time taken to announce results in the country.
What did Nepal’s election officials say?
Nepal’s Chief Election Commissioner Ram Prasad Bhandari says that he is committed to complete the counting of votes by March 9. During the last election of 2022, it took almost 2 weeks for the results to be declared. The reason for this is that some polling stations are located in inaccessible, hilly areas. More than 80 percent of Nepal is hilly areas, from where collecting ballot boxes is a challenging task.
According to Nepalese law, citizens are required to vote in their registered constituency, which is their birthplace. Counting of votes, which is done manually, also takes a lot of time. Each political party sends its representatives to the counting centers and they inspect each open ballot paper cast before counting.
how many voters in nepal
About 19 crore people in Nepal, including about 10 lakh first-time voters, are registered to elect 275 members of Parliament. Of these, 165 members will be elected through the first-past-the-post system, which means the candidate with the most votes will win the seat. The remaining 110 MPs will be elected through the proportional representation (PR) system, in which the proportion of votes received by a political party is taken into account.
Due to this dual system, it becomes difficult for any one party to win outright, hence whichever party comes on top in the elections may have to form a coalition government.
how many candidates are in the fray
According to the Election Commission, this time there are a total of 6,541 candidates. Of these, about 3,406 candidates are contesting directly elected seats, of which more than 1,000 candidates are below 40 years of age, while 3,135 candidates are contesting under the PR system. Voting will start at 7:00 am local time and continue till 5:00 pm. In some parts of the country, polling stations may remain open till late so that all interested voters can cast their vote. In the last elections, voting in some constituencies continued till 9 pm local time.
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