Officials to ensure franchise to all resettlers

by P. Krishnaswamy

Returning Officers (ROs), Assistant Returning Officers (AROs) and Assistant Commissioners of Elections (ACEs) in the four electoral districts of the Northern province are taking steps to ensure that the people of the province, including all IDPs, are provided facilities to exercise their franchise at the April 8 general election, authoritative sources said. They are working in coordination with the Elections Secretariat and the district secretariats, the sources said. The claims of certain election monitoring NGOs that hundreds of IDPs will not be able to exercise their franchise are not correct, the sources said.

It was decided at a special meeting held at the Elections Secretariat yesterday to make arrangements for recent resettlers to exercise their franchise at the April 8 general election. The ROs were requested to forward their names and details before the 25th of this month, Jaffna ACE K.Guhanathan told the Sunday Observer.

In all Northern districts electoral registers were updated in June every year and it was unlikely that names of a large number of persons were left out due to displacements during the war, he said.

Arrangements are being made to establish cluster polling booths for the IDPs in welfare camps. Senior Officers of the district secretariats have been appointed to coordinate the process of identifying persons in IDP camps whose names were left out in the enumeration process and to furnish their details to the Elections Secretariat, the ACE said, adding that he alone presented details of one thousand such persons at the meeting yesterday.

A large majority of the Northern population possessed more than one authentic document to establish their identity and, therefore, the question of IDs will not arise for exercising franchise at the upcoming elections, the ACE said. Over 11,000 temporary IDs were issued by the Elections Commissioner prior to the January 8 Presidential Poll and there were no pending applications for issue of temporary IDs, he said.