By Tenzin Monlam
DHARAMSHALA, October 22: The Dharamshala Local Election Commission (LEC) on Thursday announced the final vote count of the preliminary elections for the Tibetan Prime Minister (Sikyong) with incumbent Sikyong Dr Lobsang Sangay winning with a big margin, followed by Penpa Tsering, Lukar Jam and Tashi Wangdu.
However, Sangay has lost to incumbent Speaker in the Ghangchen Kyishong polling station, the seat of his own administration where much of the CTA staff had cast their votes.
Sonam Dorjee, Settlement officer of Dharamshala, who also heads the LEC announced that Sangay leads the final count with 2648 votes, Penpa Tsering with 1816 votes, Lukar Jam with 271 and Tashi Wangdu with 143.
Explaining the ten 10 different polling stations in and around Dharamshala, the seat of the exile government and abode of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he said, “The total number of voters registered from around the area is around 11,300. Of it, only 5117 people have voted during the recently concluded preliminary election.”
However, the Settlement Officer clarified that there were around 150 cases of invalid votes, which were due to mistakes and insufficient filling of the information in the voting form.
“There was a case of blank vote and many scrubbed and rewritten ballots, which were all considered invalid,” he added.
The counting committee consists of two members and one supervisor each from the four different Sects and four LEC members including the head of the LEC, which aggregates to 16 in total.
*The latest total updates are
Lobsang Sangay 22,063
Penpa Tsering 8,111
Tashi Wangdu 1,360
Lukar Jam 1,295
Tashi Topgyal 28
Gyari Dolma 23
Samdhong Rinpoche 9
*unofficial TibetSun Data
