EC to strictly enforce ban on voters carrying mobile phones into polling booths

Election Commission (EC) Chairman R.M.A.L. Rathnayake today said that voters are strictly prohibited from bringing mobile phones into a polling booth on Election Day. Explaining why the ban will be strictly enforced, the EC chairman pointed out that during postal voting conducted earlier this month for the upcoming presidential election, some public officials had unfortunately used mobile phones to take photographs of their ballot paper after they had voted and shared the photographs on social media.

“This is a completely illegal act, which these people did so openly. That created a lot of difficulties for us. We managed to get some posts taken down with great difficulty. But even after that, we saw some people openly challenging us by sharing the same thing on social media again. If this incident occurred at a postal voting booth, we can’t rule out the same thing happening at a normal polling booth,” he told journalists.

Mr Rathnayake was addressing a press briefing held at the Government Information Department to brief the media on arrangements for Saturday’s presidential election. 

The EC chairman urged the public to leave their mobile phones at home when they come to cast their ballots or else to hand over their mobile phone to someone outside the polling booth before entering to cast their vote. 

He said voters who had still not received their official polling cards can obtain them at their respective post offices. Alternatively, they can also visit the website of the EC and download and print out a copy. An official polling card however, is not essential for a voter to cast their ballot.

They can still visit their respective polling booth with a valid form of identification, obtain a ballot paper and cast their vote. The valid forms of identification include a person’s National Identity Card (both old and new), a valid passport, driver’s license, government pensioner’s identity card and senior citizen’s identity card. 

Voters can put ‘1’ or an ‘x’ before the name and symbol of their chosen candidate if they are only voting for one. If they want to vote for more than one candidate, they can mark up to three preferences by marking 1, 2 and 3 in that order for the candidates of their choice. 

Given the belief that this year’s presidential election will be extremely close, there is the possibility of the EC having to count preference votes in the event a candidate fails to secure 50+1 of the total vote. Explaining what happens in such an event, Mr Rathnayake stated that the two candidates with the highest number of votes will be left in the race and the other 36 candidates withdrawn.

The ballots cast for these candidates will then be examined in the order of the total number of votes they have received to check whether any of these ballots contain a preference vote cast for the two candidates left in the race.

Once all the preference votes in all the districts are submitted to the Elections Secretariat, they will be reexamined and thereafter, added to the vote tally of the two candidates still left in the race. Thereafter, of the two candidates still in the race, the one who obtains the largest number of valid votes will be declared the winner. 

Meanwhile, Police Spokesman Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Nihal Thalduwa stated that police had so far received 464 election related complaints and 148 of these were complaints related to criminal offences.

The number of complaints related to election law violations stood at 316. Police had arrested 108 suspects during their investigations into the complaints while 14 vehicles had also been taken into custody. Investigations into these complaints were continuing while police have already presented facts to court regarding some of them. 

The DIG added that some 1500 labourers had been employed on a temporary basis to remove posters, cutouts, banners and other election propaganda material that had been put up illegally. A total of 662, 676 illegal election posters have so far been removed while 219, 203 illegal posters have been taken into police custody. A total of 1609 banners had been removed while 1176 have been taken into custody. The number of illegal cutouts that had been removed stood at 1613 while 1632 had also been seized. 

On Election Day, two police officers will be deployed to each polling booth while a large team of officers under the direction of a Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) will be deployed to each of the 51 counting centres. Teams will also be deployed to set up road blocks while riot squads too will be on standby to be deployed if the need arises.

A central operations centre has been set up at Police Headquarters and will be staffed by officers from the police, tri-forces and intelligence agencies. There will also be an operations centre in each of the nine provinces under the supervision of the Senior DIG in charge of that province. These nine operations centres will be connected to the main operations centre at Police Headquarters. Intelligence officers will also be deployed in the field to look out for any trouble that may arise in the post-election period.

If they receive word of any such impending trouble, they will send word to their respective operations centre, which in turn will deploy mobile patrols or riot squads depending on the necessity. In addition, community police units too have been told to keep an eye out for any signs of trouble in their villages and to notify their respective operations centres if they detect anything, said the DIG.