EC racing to complete municipal polls by Dec

FE Team | Published: July 12, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

The Election Commission plans to complete the countrywide municipal elections by December next with the current voter list to avoid legal complexities, reports UNB.
The EC secretariat has already been instructed to prepare to complete the municipal polls by the current year, according to EC deputy secretary Shamsul Alam.
More than 270 municipalities, out of the country's 317, are going to complete their five-year tenures by March next.
The commission at a recent meeting chose the time to facilitate the countywide updating of the voter list, as there is a legal bar to updating it in polling areas after the announcement of election schedule.
Besides, the commission will have to arrange countrywide union parishad elections by March next year as the five-year tenure of the lowest tier of local government will expire in March.
The commission will start updating the voter list after Eid-ul Fitr across the country, working with an estimate that some 2.4 million possible voters will be added to the list. Data collection of the possible voters is expected to complete by November this year.
It will publish the draft updated voter list on January 2, 2016 to receive any objections or complaints over the update, and subsequently will publish the final voter list on January 31 next year. According to section 11 of the Voter List Act 2009, the voter list shall be updated through specific process between January 2 and 31 every year.
"Tenures of the municipalities will expire by March next year. But we want to complete the municipal elections by December this year to facilitate the countywide updating of the voter lists," Election Commissioner Shah Nawaz said.
The commissioner told the news agency that due to the legal bar, it is not possible for the commission to arrange the election in January next, if it wants to update the voter list in time.
"We chose the time as there'll be no activity to update the voter list in December, with field-level data collection completed by November," Shah Nawaz added.
As per section 20 of the Local Government (Municipality) Act 2009, new elections must be held in a municipality within the last 90 days before the expiry of its tenure. The last countrywide elections for 261 municipalities were held in four phases from January 12-18 in 2011 under the commission headed by ATM Shamsul Huda.
Later, the polls to some other municipalities were held, but there are some 27 municipalities to which elections have not been held for more than a decade due to legal and demarcation complexities, EC officials said.