Elections & 20th Amendment Profit Electoral Swindlers

By ZL Mohamed –June 6, 2015

In Sri Lankas’s 2015 Presidential Election, 15,044,490 voters were on the electoral rolls but the number of citizens who were of legal voting age was only 14,449,000 going by the Census data. This amounts to an unaccounted excess of 4.3% in the electoral rolls. This is alarming since the last Presidential election was decided by a margin of 3.7% and previous elections were decided by half as much. This phenomenon of “ghost-voters” was pointed out soon after the 2015 Elections by Dr. Laksiri Fernando (Colombo Telegraph, 15 January 2015) who has been studying elections in Sri Lanka in depth since 1970. He claimed that there were at least 782,460 names on the Sri Lankan electoral rolls than there were citizens of legal voting age. In the four months since Dr. Fernando put forward his claim, no one has disputed it.

As we shall see below, these ghost-voters are so numerous that they can tip the results of 15- 30 parliamentary seats in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Under the 20th amendment proposals, electoral reform is to increase representation in regions with increases in population. But such a reallocation of seats on the basis of the electoral rolls shall reward the regions with the most ghost-voters by 20-40 seats for decades.

Impact of delay in Voter Registration                          Read More