The poll-day on April 20 saw Haa choose Ugyen Namgay as the dzongkhag’s representative in the House of Review.

It is believed that incumbent Tshering Dorji lost because of the division of votes.

As Bji has the highest number of voter base of over 1,400 registered voters, the incumbent got the highest votes of about 628 from three polling stations.

Tobgay from Haa Throm got the highest votes from Katsho – 347. Ngawang Tobgay got the highest votes –361 – from Samar gewog. Ugyen Namgay got 567 votes, the highest from Sangbay gewog.

Katsho had the lowest, with about 900 registered voters.

Bji also saw the highest number of voter turnout.

Although the NC poll-day saw Ugyen Namgay win by 157 votes, the difference was not as large as the 2013 NC elections when Tshering Dorji beat other three candidates with 1,630 EVM votes and 236 postal votes.

Some voters thought that Tshering Dorji had served enough.  A majority of voters believed that all four candidates were capable and good enough to represent Haa.

An interesting thing to note from ECB’s consolidated EVM result for Haa was that while all three candidates contesting fetched zero votes in one or the other polling stations, Ugyen Namgay’s lowest EVM votes was 23.

His highest EVM vote count from a polling station was 132. Tshering Dorji’s was 261.

Ugyen Namgay said that he was confident. “But I didn’t expect the margin would be about 150 votes.”

He also led the postal ballot count with 430 votes, followed by Tshering Dorji’s 386.

“I managed to present myself to voters as a humble person. Listening more and speaking less has been a good learning process,” said Ugyen Namgay.

He said that his priority would be to strengthen the rule of law and uphold the Constitution and focus on reviewing policies. “Although improving accessibility of roads is not directly linked to our job, we would ensure that our people are provided basic facilities through policies.”

The 35-year-old councilor-elect said that he looked forward to working with local government and central agencies in ministries to solve issues in the dzongkhag.

Rinchen Zangmo | Haa

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