79% Voter Turnout In Goa, Moderate Voting In Uttarakhand, UP: 10 Points

The voter turnout till 5 pm across the 55 seats in Uttar Pradesh was 60.44 per cent, the poll panel said. Uttarakhand reported 62.5 per cent voting till 6 pm while Goa saw a whopping 78.94 per cent till 5 pm, said the poll panel.

In the politically significant UP, special focus is on eight sensitive constituencies across Bijnor, Sambhal and Saharanpur districts. The areas -- considered strongholds of the Samajwadi Party -- have a sizeable Muslim population.

Goa and Uttarakhand are seeing a single-phase voting. Forty seats of Goa and 70 seats of the hill state are going to polls.

Of the 55 seats in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP had won 38 in 2017, the Samajwadi Party won 15 and the Congress won 2.

The prominent faces contesting in this phase include senior Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan, Dharam Singh Saini, the BJP minister who switched to Samajwadi Party, and the state's Finance Minister Suresh Khanna. Azam Khan has been fielded from his stronghold Rampur and is contesting the polls from behind the bars. 

In Uttarakhand, the key candidates include Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami and his cabinet colleagues Satpal Maharaj, Subodh Uniyal, Arvind Pandey and Dhan Singh Rawat. Prominent faces from the Congress include former chief minister Harish Rawat and state Congress chief Ganesh Godiyal. Arvind Kejriwal's Aaam Aadmi Party is also contesting in Uttarakhand.

In the hill state, Chief Minister Dhami and his wife have been accused of violating the model code of conduct after they visited polling booth with scarves with the BJP symbol.

Though a small seaside state with only 40 seats, the contest in Goa has drawn the maximum eyeballs after UP, with the surprise outcome in 2017, when the Congress won the maximum number of seats, but the BJP formed the government. This time, Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party and Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress are also in fray, with hopes to expand their footprint beyond Delhi and Bengal.

The big fight will be in Panaji, where Utpal Parrikar, a BJP rebel and the son of late Manohar Parrikar, contests as an Independent against Atanasio Monserrate of the BJP. The Congress has fielded Elvis Gomes, a former bureaucrat and AAP's chief ministerial candidate in 2017. AAP has fielded Valmiki Naik for the third time.

The Trinamool Congress has been aggressively recruiting in Goa. The Aam Aadmi Party, which did not win any seats in the 2017 elections in Goa, claims they are well prepared this time.