Dhaka, August 4 Senior Secretary of Bangladesh's Election Commission, Akhtar Ahmed said on Monday that a pre-election observation team of the European Union (EU) will visit the country in September to observe the "electoral environment" before the 13th parliamentary polls scheduled to be held sometime next year.
“A pre-election observer team of the European Union will visit in mid-September. It will include three international and four local observers,” Akhtar Ahmed said, citing a formal communication received from Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
While speaking to reporters about preparation for upcoming elections, he said that the EU's pre-election observation team will assess the preparation of the Election Commission for the parliamentary elections.
According to the United News of Bangladesh, Ahmed said that registered political parties, as per legal provisions are required to submit the audited financial statement (audit report) of the immediate past calendar year by July 31. Among the 51 registered parties, 30 have submitted their audit reports while 15 have requested for extension of the deadline and the six others are newly registered.
Among the newly-registered parties, one party said that they are still not yet eligible to submit an audit report based on last year. He said that five other parties have not responded yet. Akhtar Ahmed said that this statistical update will be forwarded from EC Secretariat to the Commission which will take a decision on further action.
He said that Election Commission received 148 applications for new political party registration by the June 22 deadline. Among those, he said, three were duplicates while 145 other were valid applications. All the 145 parties have been instructed to give more documents to modify inconsistencies.
“Eighty parties have submitted their documents. Six sought time extensions. Fifty-nine did not respond. We will place these cases before the Commission for further instructions,” he said, adding that the submitted documents are being reviewed to check compliance.
He said that the poll body is preparing to release two supplementary voter lists by August 10 — one that mentions newly registered voters and another for deceased voters whose names will be dropped. The EC will accept applications about corrections, voting address changes, removal of ineligible or deceased voters from the two draft lists until August 21. After examining the documents, eligible names will be mentioned in the voter list while names of deceased will be removed. The final electoral rolls list will be published on August 31.
He mentioned that three separate voter lists will be released this year – of which one was published on March 2 while the second one will be published on August 31 and the third one for newly eligible voters on the basis of a fresh cut-off prior to the announcement of election schedule.
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