Overview

• Polling runs from 10 am to 5 pm in the new Parliament building, with a secret ballot in which MPs are not bound by party whips; counting begins at 6 pm.
• The majority mark is 391, with the NDA claiming support in the mid-420s and the Opposition around the low-to-mid 300s in an electoral college currently at 781.
• Unaligned parties have split: YSR Congress says it will back Radhakrishnan, while AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi has pledged his vote to Reddy.
• BJD and BRS have announced they will abstain, and Shiromani Akali Dal says it will boycott, narrowing the active voting pool but not erasing the NDA’s advantage.
• Both camps conducted mock polls to avoid invalid ballots as the Opposition casts the race as a conscience vote and the BJP targets Reddy over his Salwa Judum ruling and his outreach to Lalu Prasad; the election follows Jagdeep Dhankhar’s July 21 resignation.