Kathmandu: Rabi Lamichhane, Rastriya Swatantra Party President, has lambasted the Election Commission over its serious negligence of mixing ballot papers of the provincial assembly and federal parliaments, so as to create confusion among the voters.
The first ballot papers are for the first-past-the-post (FPTP) election system for the federal parliament and the second for the proportional representation category. Similarly, the third and fourth ballot papers, respectively, are for the FPTP and proportional representation category for the Province Assembly (PA) election, Lamichhane wrote on Facebook. The ballot papers should be arranged and distributed according to this order.
But ballot papers were not provided according to the stated order in the polling centers of Ward Number 9, Pathari in the Constituency-3, Morang, he said. “We found that the ballot papers of proportional category for Provincial Assembly were provided for voters of the Federal Parliament.”
According to him, the voting process was halted for a while after noticing the mistake but soon it was resumed considering it as a human error.
Lamichhane has claimed that similar types of mistakes have been found in other polling centers of the country as well and thus it could be a planned move against his party. “We have received information of similar types of mistakes in other polling centers as well. The repetition of similar types of mistakes to the same ballot with the election symbol Ghanti (bell) cannot just be a human error,” he has written.
“We request all stakeholders to carry out their duty without any prejudice and interest. We appeal to voters to ensure, before casting votes, that the ballots under proportional category for the federal parliament have the election symbol of Ghanti.”
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