General Election 2000

The Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) has concluded its analysis of the violence and violations that took place throughout the country on election day, October 10, 2000. CMEV stands by its preliminary report submitted to the Elections Commissioner in which the appeal was made to annul the poll in 17 electoral divisions comprising 1081 polling centres, since the nature and extent of violence in these electoral divisions was such as to irrevocably mar the outcome of the poll.

TABLE I

Summary by District

* This is the total indicated by the Elections Commissioner, but CMEV holds that Polling Centre no. 25, Sriyagama Community Hall, in the Hewaheta Electoral Division in the Kandy District contains 778 registered votes, not 106 as stated by the Commissioner, bringing the total of registered votes in the annulled centres in the Kandy District to 17,278.
** Includes postal votes, as per the web site of the Department of Information (www.news.lk)

CMEV wrote to the Election Commissioner that the nature and extent of violations have been so widespread and serious in the following electorates as to render the final outcome in these areas utterly meaningless. In addition, the level and degree of violence in these areas during the campaign period too was higher than in other parts of the country, CMEV, therefore, urged the Commissioner of Elections, by virtue of the powers vested in him by Sections 48 A, 128 and 129, of the Parliamentary Elections Act No 1 of 1981 to annul the voting in these electoral divisions, in order to restore credibility to the electoral process in other regions of the country.

Though these areas were the most violent, election-rigging was not confined to these areas. CMEV received reports of serious election violations, including instances of murder, bombing, stuffing of ballot boxes, removal of ballot boxes, systematic impersonation and ballot rigging, threats and intimidation of both polling agents and voters, and the use of firearms including automatic weapons, as well as the misuse of state resources including military vehicles and personnel, from 792 polling centres in 101 electorates [Please see final line of Table I above]. This constitutes approximately 8.3% of all polling centres in the country, and is 12.9% of the 6144 centres monitored by CMEV in all 22 districts.

The Table summarises CMEV’s monitoring exercise throughout the country. The leftmost column indicates both the name of the electoral district as well as the total number of pre-election incidents reported from the area. In the rightmost column are CMEV’s assessments together with a record of the Election Commissioner’s annulments/vote removals. In considering this information, it is clear that at the very least the Kandy District needs to be re-polled if any semblance of faith in the democratic process is to be maintained. For instance, the Table demonstrates that the majority of the winning party in the Kandy District is one-fifth of the votes cast in the 182 flawed polling centres CMEV monitored in the district.

It is CMEV’s considered assessment that taken as a whole the 2000 General Election was significantly marred by violence and election-related violations. In addition, the ongoing offensive in the Jaffna peninsula, as well as the de facto deprivation of voting rights to approximately 250,000 Tamil voters in so-called uncleared areas in the North-East Province has resulted in the election being a fraud in this province. In the rest of the country, 35 of CMEV’s monitors and observers were threatened and intimidated by supporters of the People’s Alliance.

The incidents reported on election day include 07 murders, which brings the total number of deaths during the election period to 73. It is important to note that CMEV’s analysis of individual polling centres is based on an assessment of events during the entire polling period, and generally involves a series of incidents. CMEV’s election day assessment is based on an evaluation of polling centres and not on the number of incidents recorded, since the effects of these incidents need to be measured in terms of the degree to which they permitted an unfettered exercise of the public franchise.

CMEV is gravely concerned that the Elections Commissioner saw fit to annul only 22 polling centres in 6 districts – 13 in the Kandy District, 01 in Matale, 04 in Nuwara Eliya, 01 in Hambantota, 02 in Balangoda, and 01 in Kegalle – while he discounted 9,274 votes forcibly stuffed in another 47 polling centres but did not annul these polling centres. In some cases his decision appears to have no rational basis at all. For instance, regarding polling centre number 20 in the Beliatta polling division where one ballot box was forcibly removed from the centre, his decision has been to discount this incident and count the ballots cast in the remaining ballot box! Not only is this a gross travesty of the rights of those legitimate voters whose ballots happened to be in the missing box, it is also explicitly counter to the provisions of 48 A (3) of the Parliamentary Elections Act No 1 of 1981.

In polling centre number 30 in the Hanguranketa polling division, the Elections Commissioner records that 01 (one) ballot was forcibly stuffed, while in Laggala in the Matale District in polling centre number 48, exactly 542 ballots were forcibly stuffed, and in Patha Dumbara in centre number 42 this number was 650. He treats this entire range, from 01 to 650, the same way – removing the offending ballots and counting the rest as if nothing untoward had happened.

CMEV’s position is that this course of action is not merely unjust by the hundreds of ordinary voters who were deterred, even prevented, from casting their votes in these areas, it is also not provided for in the Parliamentary Elections Act. CMEV reiterates that the proper and least unfair procedure would have been to annul these polling centres where forcible stuffing was established, as provided for under section 48 A (2), since the stuffing would have eaten into the time available to the voters, thereby breaking the provision for continued access to the polling centre between 7.00 am and 4.00 pm on election day.

In addition, the Commissioner’s decision to annul 42 polling centres in the Kilinochchi polling division and, subsequently, also 49 in the Mullaitivu polling division appears unacceptable at this stage. CMEV has been at pains to emphasise to the Commissioner as well as election officials in the Jaffna District that special arrangements need to be made to accommodate voters living in LTTE-controlled areas, and we have met him on two occasions to explain to him the unsatisfactory nature of the arrangements made by his staff in this regard. As regards Kilinochchi, the 42 polling centres in the so-called uncleared areas were nominally recorded as clustered at Jaffna Hindu College, but CMEV understands that they were not in fact operational. Similarly, the 49 polling centres in Mullaitivu were to be clustered in Vavuniya, the only polling centre deemed valid was No 31 which served the Sinhala population of Weli Oya. Hence, for the Commissioner to annul polling centres that he did not have on the ground is unacceptable, particularly since the total number of registered voters in the annulled polling centres of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu are approximately 56,000 and 52,000 respectively, even a fraction of whose votes would clearly alter the result in these areas. In the Jaffna District, for instance, approximately each 10,500 votes delivered a single member of parliament to each of four parties. In the 1999 Presidential Election where Kilinochchi recorded only 66 votes in total there was no annulment, raising issues of consistency as well as impartiality.

Moreover, the concrete process by which these stuffed ballots are eliminated from the counting remains unclear to CMEV, since this would require a serial count of the votes first, which the Elections Commissioner has refused to guarantee to Court (in application number 1041/2000) when requested to do a physical verification of the serial numbers of the ballot papers that have been stuffed into the boxes by issuing an order on the counting officers. CMEV is concerned with the lack of transparency and openness in the decision-making process with regard to determining the course of action to be taken concerning serious violations at polling centres, and in the inaccessibility to information relating to these decisions thereafter.

CMEV wishes to record its surprise and disappointment at the reports submitted by the Observer Missions of the EU and the British-Sri Lanka Parliamentary Group, and will be taking this issue up with the relevant authorities.

CMEV was formed in 1997 by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), the Free Media Movement (FMM) and the Coalition Against Political Violence as an independent and non- partisan organisation to monitor the incidence of election-related violence.

Dr. P. Saravanamuttu CMEV

Bandula Padmakumara CMEV

Dr. Arjuna Parakrama CMEV