Official acceptance of 13th election's nominations begins

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 17 February 2004, 16:03 GMT]
District Government Agents who are ex-offico Returning Officers of the Department of Elections Tuesday started accepting nominations from registered political parties and independent groups to contest the Sri Lanka’s thirteenth parliamentary general elections in all twenty electoral districts of Sri Lanka, election officials said.

The final day of nominations is on February 24th. Fifty-one registered parties with the Department of Elections are qualified to submit their nominations, sources said.

On the first day four political parties and an independent group submitted their nomination lists under the proportional election system, which was introduced by the 1978 constitution.

196 members will be elected under the district proportional system and another 29 will be nominated by the political parties to the national list according to votes they received. All together 225 members will be in the fourteenth new parliament of the country, sources said.

The United Socialist Party submitted its nomination for the Ratnapura district, National Development Front for the district of Hambantota and Gampaha, the Liberal Party for Matara district and the Ruhuna Peoples party for Gampaha district, election department sources said.

An independent group has submitted for the Batticaloa district.

The electoral register for the year 2002 will be used for the forthcoming general election, which has been fixed for April 2, sources said.

According to the department of elections, a total of 12,899,032 voters are eligible to case their franchise. This is an increase of 470,824 registered voters at the previous general election held in December 2001.

However about 165 thousand hill country Tamil voters who gained citizenship with the passage of Amended Citizenship Act in the parliament last year are not eligible to vote in the forthcoming general election as their names are not in the 2002 election register, sources said.