About one crore new voters are going to be added in the voter list following completion of the ongoing updating across the country. The Election Commission has already registered 90.66 lakh new voters during the updating process, EC officials said.
However, officials said the commission is having trouble to publish the final voter list in January next year as per the law. The EC is amending the voter list act which has been sent to the law ministry for vetting.
According to the Voter List Act, the commission will publish the preserved database of all voters including updated voters by January 2 to 31 every year. But the constitutional body is concerned about publishing the voter list by this time. “It is not possible to publish the voter list by January 31 as we are amending the voter list act. The amendments are now in the law ministry. After vetting, it would be placed before the cabinet and then in parliament to be passed. So it needs much time,” a senior EC official told Bangladesh Post.
The official said, the commission would publish the draft voter list on January 20 and make it public on March 1 next year. Officials of the National Identity Card wing of EC said, the commission has collected information on 15-18 year old citizens born before January 1, 2003. They will be enrolled as voters once they are 18 years old.
The country has around 104.15 million voters now – over 52.5 million male and about 51.65 million females. Meanwhile, the commission started voter list updating across the country on April 23. After ending door-to-door data collection on May 13, registration and collection of the citizens’ fingerprints at designated centres were held from May 25 to Oct 30.
More than 40,000 polling stations of the last general election were used in the registration process. During the updating, dead voters were dropped from the voter list.