Overview
- Voting began at 7:30 am across 29 municipal corporations, with polling held for 2,801 seats after 68 candidates were elected unopposed.
- Mumbai’s civic election covers 227 wards with about 1,729 candidates and more than 1.03 crore eligible voters in a single-member ward system.
- The State Election Commission deployed 43,958 control units and 87,916 ballot units statewide, including 11,349 control units and 22,698 ballot units for Mumbai.
- High-profile early voters—including Akshay Kumar, Twinkle Khanna and Sachin Tendulkar—cast ballots and urged citizens to participate, with Kumar calling voting the day “the remote control” is in people’s hands.
- The Mumbai race is framed as a fight between the BJP-led Mahayuti and the alliance of Raj and Uddhav Thackeray for control of the cash-rich BMC, which has a budget reported at over Rs 74,000 crore.