DailyMirror
The Department of Elections yesterday said they would not be providing copies of the carbonized copies of the Presidential election results of the polling centres to local Election Monitors stating that there was no necessity to provide the information to them.
Deputy Elections Commissioner, Mahinda Deshapriya said those who have been given copies of the carbon copies of the election results are the winning election candidate, the runners up and the second runners up of the recently concluded Presidential election.
He said that no one else has been given this information as the Department of Elections does not intend to provide this information to any others and the election monitors are no exception. “There is no need to give carbonized copies to them. For what reason must we do that? The copies have already been released to the public,” he said.
He acknowledged that complaints have been made about the carbon copies of the election results but insisted that the complaints are all “baseless”. When asked as to why the election monitors have not been given permission by the Department of Elections to observe counting centres in the last few years, the Deputy Elections Commissioner again said it was because there was no need for it.
“Each counting centre has five agents to observe the counting process. They are all reliable people. The counting rooms are very small and they can hold only a few. Furthermore, there is no necessity to get the Election Monitors involved in this process,” he said.