Ballot boxes for Maldives’ elections to be placed in India, Sri Lanka

The ballot boxes for Maldives’ upcoming parliamentary elections will be placed in India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia, after around 11,000 Maldivians submitted re-registration requests to relocate their polling stations, the country’s election commission announced on Sunday.

The six-day window for people to relocate their voting stations for the April 21 parliamentary elections expired on Saturday, media reports said, citing an Elections Commission notification.

The top electoral body said that ballot boxes for the island nation’s elections will also be placed in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), the capital of Kerala, Sri Lanka’s Colombo and Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur after at least 150 people re-register to vote in each of the three countries.

“As previously, enough people registered in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. And since 150 people had registered in Trivandrum, India, we have decided to set up a ballot box there,” web portal adadhu.com quoted EC’s secretary-general Hassan Zakariyya as saying.

The top polls body received 11,169 application forms requesting re-registration at different voting stations during this period. It rejected 1,141 forms, taking the total re-registrations to 10,028, the edition.mv news portal reported. Pointing out that the number of people who re-registered this year is low compared to past elections, Zakariyya said that voting will not be held in the UK, UAE and Thailand.