UNP Presidential Candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe has called for a free and fair presidential election. Given the high incidence of election malpractices and violence in this country, usually resorted to by the ruling party, the concerns of Mr. Wickremesinghe should be appreciated.

Clean elections are something that politicians remember only when they are in the Opposition and in the run up to an election. There is a pithy saying with reference to the rural folk sans proper toilet facilities and it perhaps best describes this kind of attitude: `85 bara unama thamai bedda mathak vennay, which roughly put into English, means, ‘One remembers the thicket only when one feels the urge to ease oneself!’

Under the 17 th Amendment to the Constitution, the Elections Commission (EC) was to be appointed for the purpose of battling election malpractices. But, due to a tug of war between President Kumaratunga and the Constitutional Council (CC), over the latter’s nominee, the EC could not be set up. Both parties remaining intransigent, the matter died a natural death. Now the country has come to such a pass that not even the CC can be appointed let alone the EC!

As the main Opposition party, the UNP should have campaigned vigorously to get the EC appointed. When the UNP staged its mammoth protest march from Devinuwara to Colombo, apart from its demand for a presidential election, it could have asked for the appointment of the EC, vested with wider powers to ensure clean elections. It could also have used the international forums like the recent summit of the International Democratic Union (IDU), where a resolution was passed to the effect that the next presidential election in Sri Lanka should be held in 2005 and not in 2006, to pressure the government to urgently appoint the EC. It was also not keen to get the national identity card made mandatory for voting.

Any campaign aimed at eliminating election malpractices should focus on a number of commonly used fraudulent methods. Stuffing of ballot boxes has been possible due to lack of security at polling booths, especially in suburbs and rural areas. Goons usually outnumber the police personnel, frighten the officers into submission and carry out their sordid operations. Changing ballot boxes was a method practised in the past—at the 1982 Referendum and 1988 and 89 presidential and Parliamentary elections—but due to some measures adopted such as security stickers etc. it is no longer attractive to goons, though the possibility of the practice being revived in the future cannot be ruled out.

Impersonation is galore, especially in the urban areas, where voters are not known to one another or sometimes even to polling agents who often go by the electoral lists, when names are called. The so-called indelible ink is a misnomer in that it can be removed in no time. Impersonators remove the ink by just dipping their fingers into vehicle batteries or pineapple juice. But the Elections Commissioner’s Department still uses the same ink. This serious lapse has helped the method known as multiple registration, where a voter is registered in several places so that he or she can cast his or her vote several times at different places, after deleting the ink mark. This is commonly used in urban areas especially Colombo and it could be prevented only if voter registers are made available electronically for political parties to peruse them on computers and identify the names repeated and a really indelible ink is used. DUNF Leader the late Mr. Lalith Athulathmudali was one of the few leaders who made an attempt to counter this method but his efforts ended with his assassination and the subsequent disintegration of the DUNF.

However, what has the greatest potential to distort the outcome of the next presidential election is the mass scale rigging in the North and the East by the LTTE. At the last general election, according to international monitors including those from countries such as EU sympathetic to the LTTE, the elections there were marred by malpractices. The Cushnahan Report clearly states that the elections in those areas were not free and fair. But the results were considered valid and the LTTE proxies entered Parliament on the basis of those rigged elections. What a blow to democracy!

There were reports of even 10-year-old boys and girls on orders of the LTTE ‘practising their franchise.’ (Has the LTTE introduced to the world ‘Child Voters’ in addition to child soldiers?) Letting a terrorist organisation interfere with the election of people’s representatives and national leaders makes a mockery of democracy. The international community must take serious note of the situation and act to preserve Sri Lanka’s democracy. While the people living in the North and the East must be given an opportunity to exercise their voting rights, ways and means of ridding the elections of malpractices must be devised. Bringing in more international monitors from neutral countries, deploying the security forces personnel in adequate numbers and the cancellation of the votes polled at the centres affected by rigging are some of the methods that need to be adopted.