Voting for Karnataka Assembly Elections 2018 was held on May 12 at 56,696 polling booths across the state. The 2018 Karnataka assembly election is a majorly a power contest between the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S). The Elections Commission of India will announce the results today. The southern state is one of the three states where Congress managed to be in power while the BJP rose to power in rest of the states and Union territories in the country. Watch live streaming of Karnataka Assembly Election Results 2018 on Kannada TV9, via the embedded link below. As the counting is all set to begin at 8 am, catch live updates of the elections results here.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah who is leading the campaign in the state has expressed his confidence in Congress coming to power with a huge majority. The CM who travelled at the length of the state wooing voters never left any opportunity to take a dig at BJP with his scathing comments. Watch the live streaming of Karnataka Assembly Elections 2018 on TV9 Youtube Channel here.

Meanwhile, the BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi ensured his promises thoroughly echoed across the state ahead of the elections. Attacking the Congress on numerous occasions, he has promised to make a ‘Nava Karnataka’ (New Karnataka) if the party comes to power. Meanwhile, the JD (S), led by former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, who also plans to rule to the state is a tough competition to the other national parties.

Karnataka has a 4.96-crore electorate, including 2.44 crore women this year. The single-phase polling in 222 constituencies included 36 reserved for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and 15 for the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and 26 in Bengaluru. Over 15 lakh people are first-time voters in the 18-19 age group. Tight security was in place to ensure smooth polling. The majority mark for any party to form the government is 112. A total of 2,654 candidates are contesting for 222 assembly seats in Karnataka.

Among the six major opinion polls released ahead of the elections, five have predicted hung assembly in the state. While the Siddaramaiah government wants to come back to power, in Karnataka, in the past, an incumbent government has never been re-elected since 1985.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 15, 2018 07:06 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).