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2 million including Sri Lankans overseas, will not be able to vote
View(s):By Mimi Alphonsus
More than 11% of Sri Lanka’s adult population will not be able to cast their vote in the presidential election being held in a few weeks. Those working abroad make up the largest component of this disenfranchised population.
According to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, an estimated 1.6 million people are working abroad mainly in the Gulf states as construction workers and domestic workers.
Senaka Perera
Sri Lankans working overseas remit billions in essential foreign exchange.
Labour exporters such as India and the Philippines facilitate voting by their overseas nationals.
People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) Executive Director Rohana Hettiarachchi said that it is not easy to institute external voting.
“Most people working abroad are low-skilled workers and can be easily influenced by embassies (in their host countries), which are heavily politicised,” he explained. “They have a right to mark their ballot, but we have to be very careful to ensure there is a proper system in place first, with at least election monitors.”
Only state employees involved in election duties, security services, and essential services use a special system—postal voting—to mark their ballot. Besides overseas voters, PAFFREL estimates that 500,000 residing in Sri Lanka will be unable to vote.
Among the estimated 500,000 are 20,000 eligible remand prisoners, thousands of hospital patients, and hundreds of institutionalised drug dependent people who will be effectively obstructed from voting. Many of those employed in the hospitality industry, media, ports, airports, and Free Trade Zones (FTZ) as well as elders and people with disabilities, will not be able to vote.
“Creating alternative mechanisms locally is much easier,” Mr. Hettiarachchi said. “This can look like advanced voting for those who can’t travel on the day of the election, or it can look like special polling stations, for example, outside the Katunayake Free Trade Zone. It can even be a mobile station or an extension of the existing postal voting system.”
PAFFREL and others, including the Election Commission, have been advocating for such alternative systems for decades.
“We proposed an advanced voting system and have been pushing for a law for two decades but without success,” said Elections Commissioner Saman Sri Ratnayake. “Without a law, there is simply nothing we can do.” A proposed law on alternative voting is before the Cabinet.
The Committee to Protect Rights of Prisoners (CPRP), meanwhile, has taken legal action. “We have filed a fundamental rights case with the Supreme Court, but it has been postponed till next March,” said CPRP Chairman Senaka Perera. “We are pushing the Prisons Department and Election Commission, but no one wants to speak publicly about prisoners voting rights because they are so marginalised.”
Most of the disenfranchised population shares certain characteristics, meaning that their inability to vote may disproportionately affect the outcome of the election.
Sri Lankans working abroad and in factories in the FTZ area are mostly from working class, low-income families. The same is true of the majority of remand prisoners.
“If people going abroad to work could vote, I believe politicians might get more serious about facilities for them and resolving their problems,” said Mr. Hettiarachchi.
Citizens have been doing what they can to ensure the closest thing to universal franchise.
Mr. Perimbana-yagam, who runs an elders home in Batticaloa, said he plans to take the seniors to vote on September 21. “It will cost us a lot for trishaws, but we are trying our best,” he said. “The elders are very interested in the election and so enthusiastic about casting their vote.”
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