On September 4, 2020 the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced that it would hold Bihar assembly polls and bypolls to one Lok Sabha and 64 Assembly seats in 15 states simultaneously. General assembly elections of Bihar are due and required to be completed before November 29, 2020.
The decision was made on the basis of feedback and inputs of state governments and its chief electoral officers taking into consideration several factors like heavy rains in some areas, and hurdles like corona pandemic.
As per the ECI, clubbing the elections together will ease the movement of central armed police forces (CAPF), other law and order forces, and related logistics issues.
The bypoll for the Valmiki Nagar Lok Sabha seat in Bihar has been pending following the death of JD(U)’s Baidyanath Prasad Mahto, the sitting MP. Among the 64 vacant assembly seats, 27 are in Madhya Pradesh—most of which fell vacant when rebel Congress members resigned from the party and the assembly to join the BJP, leading to the fall of the Congress-led government in the state. The other vacant seats are in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat (eight each), Manipur (five), Assam, Jharkhand, Kerala, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu, Odisha (two each), Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Karnataka, and West Bengal (one each).