The British Tamil Conservatives has sent a brief to the British Government, European Union, and the European and Commonwealth election monitoring teams to urge the Election Commissioner of Sri Lanka to mitigate potential opportunities to manipulate the preferential vote count process in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

A spokesperson at the BTC told Tamil Guardian that “credible sources on the ground had said that there was vote manipulation in the preferential vote count stage of the previous parliamentary elections. Given how crucial this election is in voting genuine representatives for all people in Sri Lanka, we want to ensure their democratic choice is respected.”

See press brief below.

BTC URGES MONITORS TO STOP PREFERENTIAL VOTE RIGGING

The parliamentary elections scheduled to be held on the 17th August 2015 in Sri Lanka  will result in either the return of the Mahinda Rajapaksa rule or lead to possible continuation of the UNP led coalition espousing 'good governance'. Given the above, the results of the upcoming parliamentary elections are important for all Peoples of Sri Lanka. Therefore, it is paramount the elections are conducted freely and fairly.

The British Tamil Conservatives (BTC) are pleased to see election monitors from the EU already on the ground monitoring the campaign phase. We also understand that the election monitors will oversee the voting and counting processes at select voting centres and counting offices. We would like to highlight a particular area of the counting process which has been subjected to manipulation in past elections.

The parliamentary elections in Sri Lanka requires voters to firstly vote for a party of their choice and then if they wish to, vote for up to 3 candidates within the party of their choice.

There are serious concerns that certain parties could utilise the opportunity arising from the above process to ensure candidates of their choice are declared winners irrespective of peoples' choice.

For example, the UPFA leadership could manipulate preferential votes counting to ensure candidates  supportive of Mahinda Rajapaksa are declared winners.

The process of counting of votes can be classified into three stages.

Stage 1 - Counting of the number of ballot papers in each box and transferring them to the trough. 

Stage II - Sorting and counting the ballot papers according to the valid votes received and the preparation of the statement of votes received by each party and group in the Electoral District. 

Stage III - Recording the preferences received by each candidate in the Tally Sheet and transferring them through a series of Summary Sheets into a District List for a party or a group, which gives the total of preferences received by each candidate in the Electoral District. 

In the past, Stage III of the counting process has not always been conducted with the same rigour as the first two stages, given the allocation of parliamentary seats by party had already been determined. Election Monitors in the past have reported instances where the process of counting preferential votes for candidates within a party had been handed to over party workers. This scenario has enabled party leadership to manipulate the counting process to promote the candidates of their choice. 

Therefore to ensure the will of the people is held, BTC calls for all three counting processes including the counting of preferential votes should be conducted by election officials and EU election monitors ensure this.