Veteran leader and UPA candidate Pranab Mukherjee is racing ahead in the Presidential elections, counting of votes is taking place on Sunday. Going by the reports, Pranab is all set to win the elections with a huge margin over his rival NDA candidate P A Sangma.

What is interesting in the Presidential elections is that as many as five votes from Andhra Pradesh state assembly were declared invalid. Out of 190 votes polled from the state, Pranab got 182 votes, whereas Sangma managed to get only three votes. Of these three votes, two votes were invariably polled by BJP legislators (only two of them cast their vote), whereas independent MLA Nagam Janardhan Reddy claimed that he has voted for Sangma, as he did not want to vote for Pranab because of his anti-Telangana stand.

Now, the question is whose votes would have become invalid. Two other rebel TDP legislators – Koppula Hareeshwara Reddy and S Venugopala Chary also claimed to have voted for Sangma on the same Telangana stand, but since Sangma got only three votes, they might have definitely not voted for him. May be they have dropped empty ballots in the ballot box. The other three also could have been from the Telangana Congress camp. Since they did not want to vote for Pranab, they might have ensured that their votes get invalid.