New Delhi: The 121 constituencies that went to polls on Thursday (November 6) in the first phase of Bihar’s assembly elections recorded a “historic” voter turnout of 64.66% as of 8:15 pm, the Election Commission (EC) has announced.The 64.66% figure for the first phase is higher than the 64.6% that Bihar clocked during the 1998 Lok Sabha elections and the 62.57% that the state registered in the assembly polls in 2000, per a communique issued by the EC, which clarified that 1,570 presiding officers were yet to update turnout figures on the commission’s internal network.As many as 3.75 crore voters were eligible to vote in the first phase, including 10.72 lakh ‘new electors’. The voting happened in as many as 45,341 polling stations, out of which 36,733 are in rural areas.Among the districts that went to polls today, Begusarai recorded the highest turnout of 67.32%, followed by Gopalganj at 64.96% and Muzaffarpur at 65.23% as of 8 pm. The Patna district recorded a voter turnout of 55.02%.Meanwhile, none of the districts recorded a turnout of less than 50%.Going by ground sentiments, the contest is mostly bipolar, in spite of a spirited entry by the Jan Suraaj Party led by Prashant Kishor, concentrated between the two big political fronts – the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led Mahagathbandhan and the Janata Dal (United) (JD(U))-led National Democratic Alliance.Top leaders in the fray in the first phase include the Mahagathbandhan’s chief ministerial face Tejashwi Yadav, who’s contesting from Raghopur, along with over a dozen BJP and JD(U) ministers from the current government, including deputy chief ministers Samrat Choudhary (Tarapur) and Vijay Kumar Sinha (Lakhisarai).Tejashwi’s elder brother Tej Pratap Yadav is contesting from from Mahua in Vaishali district under his new Janshakti Janata Dal banner, after being expelled from RJD earlier this year.The Election Commission said it was monitoring the polling through the live feed available from over 45,000 polling stations. For the first time in the state, CCTVs were installed in all polling stations.The 2000 assembly election in which Bihar recorded a 62.57% turnout – which the EC noted was the highest before Thursday’s first-phase figure of 64.66% – was the first one to be held after the RJD was founded by Tejashwi’s father Lalu Prasad Yadav in 1997.The RJD won the most seats that election but the BJP formed a short-lived government along with its ally in the Samata Party.This story was updated with figures from the EC’s 8:15 pm turnout figure.