12 October 2024 12:00 am Views - 64
By Leenah Wahab
Around 3,000 stationary observers are to be deployed on Election Day, and roughly 1,000 observers will be monitoring postal voting, PAFFREL said yesterday.
Executive Director of the People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) Rohana Hettiarachchi, said PAFFREL aims to monitor the General Election similarly to how it handled the Presidential Election and are providing training staff to effectively observe and report on the process. “Following nominations, we (PAFFREL) will deploy 116 to 200 observers at each electoral division. In addition, we have set up field coordinators in each district as well as a complaint mitigation centre working with the election commission,” he said.
Mr. Hettiarachchi further said 350 mobile teams are yet to be deployed, with one team carrying four observers which comes to around 1,400 observers. There will also be 300 counting observers stationed at each counting centre to ensure that the tallying process is conducted transparently without irregularity. Social media monitoring will also be monitored by a joint team between Hashtag Generation and PAFFREL, with daily reports being issued to the Election Commission.
When asked how PAFFREL will monitor campaign financing for the upcoming election given the large number of candidates, Mr. Hettiarachchi said PAFFREL is in negotiations with other civil society organisations to set up collective monitoring factions.
Furthermore, PAFFREL has sent a special request letter to the Election Commission to investigate complaints filed during the recent Presidential Election and provide a comprehensive report of the cases to the public.
Moreover, Mr. Hettiarachchi said PAFFREL is open for parties to train polling agents. “Party polling agents were trained during the Presidential Election as well,” he said. PAFFREL will simultaneously be running voter education programmes on social and mainstream media to inform new voters.