YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) candidate Mekapati Vikram Reddy won the Atmakur Assembly seat with a margin of 82,888 votes over BJP’s Bharath Kumar Gundlapalli.
The YSRCP candidate, brother of deceased sitting MLA and Industries and Information Technology Minister Mekapati Goutham Reddy, polled 1,02,241 votes and his nearest Bharatiya Janata Party rival G. Bharat Kumar Yadav 19,353 votes. Bahujan party candidate Obulesu got 4,904 votes.
The YSRCP nominee secured a lead of 5,337 votes in the first round. He improved the voting margin to 12,863 after two rounds.
The counting progressed on 14 tables at the Andhra Engineering college for counting of votes in 20 rounds starting with postal ballots under the supervision of District Collector and District Election Officer K.V.N. Chakradhar Babu and Superintendent of Police Ch. Vijaya Rao.
The polling percentage had dropped in the byelection to 64.26% of the 2.13 lakh voters in the by-election as against 82.44% in 2019 giving anxious moments over the victory margin.
Goutham Reddy had won the seat by a margin of over 22,000 votes in 2019 and more than 31,000 votes in 2014.
Twelve other candidates, who were in the fray could not make any mark in the bypoll. The main opposition Telugu Desam Party has kept away from the bypoll as per a convention set in the past to facilitate a facile victory for a member of the deceased sitting MLA in the bypoll.
