Lucknow Khand MLC Result 2026: BJP's Umesh Dwivedi Wins Teachers' Seat for a Third Straight Term; Graduates' Count Continues

The BJP has held on to the Lucknow teachers' seat for a third straight election. Umesh Dwivedi, who first won the Lucknow Khand Teachers' constituency in 2014 and again in 2020, completed a hat-trick in the early hours of Wednesday, defeating the Samajwadi Party's Sushil Kumar in a 13-candidate field. He led from the first table of the first round to the last round of counting.

Lucknow teachers' MLC result 2026

Round 1: all 13 candidates

Round-1 lead: 3,652. Invalid votes for the round were not reported. Note that two candidates named Sushil Kumar were on the ballot — the SP's candidate and an independent who received 58 votes.

Dwivedi's 55% of the first-round votes was the key number: in a single-transferable-vote contest a candidate needs more than half of the valid votes to win outright, and he was above that line from the start. He led on all 14 tables in round 1; his narrowest table was table 13, where he got 405 votes to the SP's 335. The second and final round added 5,319 votes to his total.

What decided the Lucknow teachers' seat

• Incumbency: Dwivedi was seeking a third term as the sitting MLC, in a seat where only about 51% of registered teachers voted.
• A two-way race: Apart from the two main parties' candidates, nobody crossed 1,000 votes in round 1, so the contest was effectively Dwivedi against Sushil Kumar — and Dwivedi's first-round tally was more than double Kumar's.
• BJP momentum: The Lucknow result came alongside BJP wins in the Meerut-Saharanpur and Bareilly-Moradabad teachers' seats, giving the party three of the six teachers' seats.

The counting was not smooth. Both parties traded allegations through the evening, and protests over alleged irregularities delayed the declaration by about two hours. The allegations have not been verified.

Lucknow graduates' seat: counting continues

The bigger, slower contest is the Lucknow Khand Graduates' seat, where more than one lakh ballots must be counted by hand. It is a rematch of 2020: the BJP's sitting MLC Avanish Kumar Singh against Kanti Singh, who lost to him by 6,403 votes after preference counting as an independent in 2020 and is now the SP's candidate. Sixteen candidates are in the fray, and turnout on 23 October was a low 38.02% — just 34.51% in Lucknow district, which alone has 96,070 graduate electors.

• Tuesday evening: First-round counting was not complete, and no trend was released.
• About 3 am Wednesday: Ballots were still being taken out of boxes and bundled, according to Amar Ujala.
• Late night: One report claimed Kanti Singh was about 1,400 votes ahead in early counting. No official round figures had been released to confirm it.
• 7:26 am: Counting was still under way.

Rounds at other seats have covered about 14,000 ballots each (14 tables of roughly 1,000), so the first-preference count alone takes about seven or eight rounds here. If neither main candidate gets more than half the valid votes — roughly 50,000 — the lowest candidates will be eliminated one by one and their second preferences transferred, which is how the 2020 contest was decided. A result is expected later on Wednesday. Follow it on our graduates' results page and the UP MLC scoreboard.