(COLOMBO) – An estimated two million will not be able to vote at the forthcoming September 21 Sri Lankan presidential elections for more than one reason, a senior top election official has revealed.
At present there are some 1.5 million Sri Lankan expatriate workers embedded mainly in the Middle Easter region and elsewhere and they will have to stay without a vote.
Unlike in India and the Philippines workers from those countries could electronic voting the but that is not the case in Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan Election Commissioner Saman Sri Ratnayake said.
“We have proposed an advance voting system for the past two decades without any success.
Without a proper law in place there is nothing we can do”, he said.
At present there are some 20,000 prisoners in the country’s jails and they are not eligible to vote, says Senaka Perera with the Committee to Protect the Rights of Prisoners (CPRP).
Not only that hundreds of thousands of workers attached with the Free Trade Manufacturing Zones will also be excluded from the vote since 90 percent or even more are from far flung rural areas, he said.
Others affected would be media workers, hospital patients, the entertainment industry and so on, Perera added.
He said that they had already filed a Fundamental Rights application in the Supreme Court but the hearing has been postponed for March 2025.
An estimated 17 million people are eligible to vote at the forthcoming elections from a population of a little 21 people.
