Recently the Maldives’ election commission announced that, for the upcoming parliamentary elections, the ballot boxes will be placed in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and India. This change came after over 150 individuals re-registered to vote in each of the three countries.
The polling authority informed that the ballot boxes for the upcoming parliamentary elections will be placed in Kerala’s capital, Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), Sri Lanka’s Colombo, and Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur.
On Saturday, March 16, the six-day window that permitted citizens to relocate their voting stations for the April 21 parliamentary elections expired, as per media reports that cited Maldives’ Elections Commission notification. This decision came after around 11,000 Maldivians urged the top electoral body to move their polling stations and, therefore, submitted their re-registration requests.
The island nation’s secretary-general Hassan Zakariyya said that, as previously, a lot of people registered in Malaysia and Sri Lanka. And since 150 people had registered in Trivandrum, India has decided to set up a ballot box there.
Hassan Zakariyya noted that the number of individuals who re-registered this year is much less compared to past elections. The EC official also mentioned that voting would not be held in Thailand, UAE, and UK.
During this time, the island nation’s polling authority got 11,169 application forms requesting re-registration at different voting stations. The edition. mv news portal stated that the EC rejected 1,141 forms, bringing the total number of re-registrations to 10,028.
Since the election date clashed with the month of Ramzan, the official election date was postponed. Previously, the parliamentary elections were scheduled to take place on Sunday, March 17, but now they have postponed it to April 21 to avoid conducting elections during the Ramzan. According to the Sun. mv news, In the upcoming elections for 93 parliamentary seats, a total of 389 candidates are contesting. The pro-India main opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) is challenging for 90 seats, which has the highest number of candidates. The main ruling coalition of the Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) and the People’s National Congress (PNC) is contesting for 89 seats.
