Colombo: Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has summoned the new Parliament to meet on Aug 20 after the critical gen. elections slated to take (2) place on Wed., the Presidents Media Division (PMD) declared on Tue..
Rajapaksa has made this call within the powers vested in him by this Constitution of Sri Lanka & the Parliamentary Election Act, the Daily Mirror quoted the PMD as informing.
The President had dissolved Parliament in Mar, paving the way for the 16th gen. elections that are originally planned for Apr 25, however have been deferred twice because of the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic.
Voting to elect a new 225-member Parliament going to start in seven a.m. on Wed. & going to end in five p.m.
The counting of the voted going to begin in seven a.m. the following day because of the COVID-19 health rules, unlike in recent yrs. when counting started the same night as polling day.
The President’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party has to win a majority (113 seats) within the home in order to secure the govt’s complete curb within the semi-presidential representative democracy.
Because of the epidemic, the Elections Commission has stated multiple new health instructions going to be in place to enable voters to cast their own ballots on polling day.
Last week, Mahinda Deshapriya, chief of the Election Commission (EC) of Sri Lanka, informed the Daily Mirror news paper that Wed.’s polls would be the most costly within the biography of the island-nation, “as we’ve to deploy extra employees with masks, sanitizers & all different health instructions”.
Deshapriya stated the EC has been trying to keep the cost in 10 billion LKR & not exceed it