The two main contenders in the election, mainly the ruling UFPA has violated the election commissioner’s directions on displaying huge cut outs. The Sri Lankan police have openly declared their inability to maintain discipline in this crucial election.

The election laws have also been violated by inability of the authority appointed by the Election Commissioner to enforce balanced and fair proportion of media time to all the candidates by the State controlled media. ‘The State media has been highly abused in an unfair manner to favour the ruling incumbent president of the day’, said Siritunga Jayasuriya. Frustrated by the situation of helplessness that the election commission faces, the Commissioner has been forced to withdraw his appointee for state media monitoring.

Another point of serious violation that is emerging is the disastrous situation in the North of the country in general and Jaffna in particular. The election commissioner has admitted that he is faced with a situation where there are 721,359 registered voters in Jaffna, but more than half of those are either missing or have gone abroad. Only 231,000 people in the area have received the election ID cards and the rest are available for misuse. It is needless to say that given the corrupt nature of the present government, a mass scale rigging of votes is waiting to happen’, warned Siritunga Jayasuriya.

The USP candidate has called upon the people to be vigilant against the possible malpractices in the ensuing elections.