Sri Lanka’s Election Commission fails to promote a campaign on voting

Sri Lanka Election Commission has failed to come up with a campaign to promote the voting in the midst of the voters in the coming Presidential election. The Election Commission should give a call to remind the duty of every citizen to exercise his franchise.

The campaign of the political parties for the forthcoming presidential election to take place on the 26th January was in its full swing, the din and noise everywhere.

Today is the last day for the candidates to wind up their election campaign, and by midnight their campaign should come to an end.

Unfortunately, there is no indication forthcoming from the Commissioner of Elections to run a campaign to promote people to come out and vote and exercise their franchise. The campaign would serve to remind the citizens’ duty.

Even in the last Presidential polls, the Election Commission did not run a campaign to encourage voters to cast votes without fail.

The election according to the Commissioner of Election is to be based on the 2008 voters’ register.

According to the 2008 voters’ register there is a total of 14, 088, 500 voters.

In the last Presidential polls held on 17 November 2005, out of the total votes of 13,327,160 votes only 9, 717, 039 voters cast their votes in that presidential election.

According to 2008 Voters register in the electoral districts in the North and East there are –
In Jaffna 721, 357, Vanni – 266, 978, Trincomalee 241, 133, Digamadulla 420, 835, Batticaloa 333, 644 - votes.

According to Election Monitoring Groups, though there 721, 357 registered votes in the Jaffna electoral district, it is learnt that only about 400,000 voters actually live in this area. Out of that according to our Jaffna Correspondent just 200,000 voters are expected to cast their votes.

Similarly in Vanni out of the 266, 978 registered voters, our Vavuniya Correspondent indicated it is unlikely whether anything above 100, 000 voters might vote in this election.

But in the three electoral districts in the Eastern Province, according to reports from our correspondents, as they are multilingual electorates, a total of 55 per cent of the voters are expected to go to poll.

It must be noted that this is the first national level election, the Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese in the North and East are expected to cast their votes freely without any threat or intimidations.

Unfortunately in these two provinces, there is already a culture of voluntarily boycotting the elections.

Therefore, Election Commission must have taken the lead and initiated a campaign to promote voting in the midst of the voters.

Observers believe that a maximum of 51 to 52 percentages of the total voters might be exercising their franchise in this presidential election as candidates have urged the voters to cast their votes for them, but none of them have urged voters to come out in full strength to exercise their franchise in this election without fail.

Therefore it is expected that there will a very low voter turnout.

- Asian Tribune -