Certain media reports denied:

Facilities for all in North to vote

by P. Krishnaswamy

All eligible voters in the Northern Province irrespective of their present places of residence, including IDPs in welfare centres and those living with friends or relatives, will be provided facilities to exercise their franchise at the January 26 Presidential Polls, said GA for Vavuniya P. S. M. Charles. She is Returning Officer for the Polling Districts of Vavuniya, Mullaitivu and Mannar.

Senior officers of the Department of Elections who have been assigned to oversee the process, all Assistant Returning Officers (AROs), Assistant Commissioners of Elections (ACEs), Grama Niladharis and officials of the Government Secretariats were working in coordination in this exercise, she also said.

A senior officer of the Elections Department who has been assigned to coordinate the process denied reports in some sections of the Tamil and English media that a large number of voters in the province will be deprived of their right to vote due to the stipulated elections procedure requiring IDP families to apply again for enumeration.

He said this requirement has been dispensed with and all voters in the province will be provided the opportunity to vote, including all IDPs.

But IDPs living in districts outside the North were required to apply in prescribed forms for enumeration and 16,000 applications have been received from them, he said. The process of establishing polling booths, including special polling booths and cluster polling booths, will begin in due course.

Free transport and other necessary facilities will be provided to IDPs to travel to their respective polling centres and back, he said.

ACE for Vanni, A. S. Karunanidhi told the Sunday Observer that the number of registered voters in the Vavuniya Polling District is 112,924 according to the 2008 Voters Register, 68,729 in the Mullaitivu Polling District and 65,322 in the Mannar Polling District.

These were figures updated annually on information furnished by Grama Niladharis, with the inclusion of details of youth who had reached the age of 18 and deletion of the names of the dead.

After getting special permission of the Commissioner General of Elections, the Voters Register for Mullaitivu Polling District was updated annually from 2003 onwards.

The number of voters in 2003 was 53,547 and the register was progressively updated and the number in 2008 was 68,729, after inclusions and deletions, Karunanidhi said.

The names of those who had left as migrants, however, remain unchanged, he said.

ACE for Jaffna, P. Guhanathan said that the number of registered voters in the Jaffna Polling District is 630,548 and the number in the Kilinochchi Polling District is 90,811.