Bengaluru, May 23 (IANS): Counting of votes began on Thursday in all the 28 Lok Sabha constituencies across Karnataka, an official said.

The vote count began at 8 a.m., with postal ballots taken up first, the official told IANS here.

Of the 98,606 postal ballots received, 25,768 are from service voters.

Counting centres are in the district headquarters of each parliamentary seat while three are in Bengaluru for each of its three constituencies - North, Central and South.

The vote count for the two by-elections held on May 19 in the Chincholi and Kundagol Assembly segments also began simultaneously in Kalaburagi and Dharwad districts.

Of the 5.12-crore electorate in the 28 seats, 3.51-crore voted, accounting for 68.61 per cent.

A total of 461 candidates contested in the 28 seats, of which five are reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC) and two for Scheduled Tribes (ST).

The counting in each constituency will be from its 7-8 assembly segments and 224 in all the 28 Lok Sabha seats. In all, there were 58,186 polling stations.

The 14 seats which went to the polls in the first phase are Udupi-Chikmagalur, Hassan, Dakshina Kannada, Chitradurga (SC), Tumkur, Mandya, Mysore, Chamarajnagar (SC), Bangalore Rural, Bangalore North, Bangalore Central, Bangalore South, Chikkaballapur and Kolar (SC).

The 14 others where polling was held in the second phase are Chikkodi, Belgaum, Bagalkot, Bijapur (SC), Gulbarga (SC), Raichur (ST), Bidar, Koppal, Bellary (ST), Haveri, Dharwad, Uttara Kannada, Davanagere and Shimoga.

There are 40 VVPATs in every Lok Sabha constituency in the state.