AIADMK chief J. Jayalalithaa, a bitter critic of the electronic voting machines, faced some difficulty in registering her vote Wednesday following which she took it up with the officials who rectified it immediately.
The former chief minister is learnt to have waited for a few minutes before exercising her franchise at the booth in Stella Maris College.
Tamil ‘superstar’ Rajinikant had some tough moments with still and video cameras surrounding him to get pictures and shots of the ‘Enthiran’ star exercising his franchise.
The actor pressed the button on the EVM in full media glare. However, his contemporary and veteran actor Kamal Haasan cast his vote after ensuring that the lensmen and videographers were kept at bay.
Top actors, Suriya, his brother Karthi, Ajith Kumar, Sneha and others waited in the queue to cast their votes in their constituencies.
Top comedian Vadivelu, also DMK’s star campaigner who took on DMDK founder Vijayakanth in a no-holds-barred electioneering, was seen cracking jokes with booth officials.
But queue-jumping celebrities ruffled the feathers of voters in several booths. At a booth on T.T.K. road, an irate voter argued with the police when actress Trisha and her mother were escorted into the booth, jumping the queue. After others also began protesting, Trisha said she had no problem joining the queue and waited for her turn.
At the Kaveri high school polling booth at Saligramam, the daughters of a veteran Kollywood actor, who are in the news for all the wrong reasons, breezed in to cast their vote at noon, making the voters who had been waiting in long queues for over an hour, angry.
“These women walked straight into the room, cast their vote and left. When we asked the policeman on duty why they were allowed ahead of everybody else, he said, ‘VIPs are given preference over the general public’,” fumed a voter Sapna Abraham, observing that several non-entities in the area were given celebrity status on Wednesday.
At a booth near Valluvar Kottam, the son of an industrialist was reprimanded by the voters when he attempted to use his clout to jump the queue.
