Thaindian News

Colombo, Feb 6 (IANS) A Sri Lankan election monitoring group Saturday urged the political parties to encourage more people from the minority population to vote in the upcoming parliamentary polls.
People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (Paffrel) said political parties must encourage more people from the Northern and Eastern provinces to vote in the parliamentary elections.

“There are a lot of people in the two provinces whose names have not appeared in the voter register. So political parties must take action to give them franchise,” Rohana Hettiarachchi, executive director of Paffrel, told reporters.

The Jan 26 presidential election was held on the basis of the 2008 electoral register and the parliamentary elections would also be held based on the same register. But election monitors argue if people’s names had been included in any previous year’s register they should be allowed to vote, Xinhua reported.

Election officials said only 47,000 people were eligible to vote in the presidential election out of about 300,000 minority Tamils who were displaced by the final battles between the government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels last year.

Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake admitted that though some 700,000 people had been registered to vote from the northern district of Jaffna, at least half of them were either living overseas or in other parts of the island.

Over 14 million of Sri Lanka’s 20 million population are registered voters.