Voting began on Thursday morning in 91 constituencies across 18 states and two union territories as the Lok Sabha elections 2019 first phase kicked off. As many as 175 assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh, 32 seats in Sikkim and 28 in Odisha are also going to polls simultaneously.

In the first phase of the mega seven-phase exercise, all Lok Sabha constituencies of Andhra Pradesh (25), Telangana (17), Uttarakhand (5), Meghalaya (2) and Arunachal Pradesh (2), besides the lone seats of Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, Sikkim, Andaman and Nicobar, and Lakshadweep are going to polls.

Besides, voting in under way for eight seats in Uttar Pradesh, seven in Maharashtra, four in Bihar, five in Assam, four in Odisha, two each in Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal and one seat in Chhattisgarh.

There are a total of 543 Lok Sabha seats in all and polling for all the seats will be held in seven phases — April 11, April 18, April 23, April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19. Counting will be done on May 23.

Among the seven phases to he held, the first phase has the third biggest number of Lok Sabha seats going to polls.

In UP, the eight out of total 80 seats going to polls today are Saharanpur, Kairana, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddha Nagar. In Bihar, voting is under way in four — Aurangabad, Gaya, Nawada and Jamui — out of 40 seats. In West Bengal that has 42 Lok Sabha seats, Cooch Behar and Alipurduar are going to polls today.

Of Maharashtra’s 48 constituencies, voting istaking place in the seven constituencies of Vidharbha in the first phase — Wardha, Ramtek, Nagpur, Bhandara-Gondiya, Gadchiroli-Chimur, Chandrapur, Yavatmal-Washim.

Assam’s Tezpur, Kaliabor, Jorhat, Dibrugarh and Lakhimpur are voting today, besides Odisha’s Kalahandi, Nabarangpur, Berhampur and Koraput, and Chhattisgarh’s Bastar.

A total of 1,279 candidates are int he fray, and their fate will be decided by over 14.21 crore voters. According to Election Commission data, there is a total of 14,21,69,537 eligible voters, 7,22,17,733 of them male and 6,98,55931 of them female. There are an additional 7,764 third gender voters.

More than 1.7 lakh polling booths have been set up across the 20 states and UTs for the massive democratic exercise.