Staff Reporter :
Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Kazi Habibul Awal made a comment on the recently concluded Pakistan National parliament election saying that it has drawn huge response and people participated in their hordes which is ‘unprecedented’.
He made the comment while addressing the installation ceremony of the new committee of Reporters Forum for Election and Democracy (RFED) – an organisation of journalists working in the Election Commission, held at Nirbachan Bhaban capital Agargaon area on Tuesday.
The Election Commission has decided to introduce a new electoral system and labeled it as ‘staggered election system’, he explained the idea saying that the system will be applied in upcoming local body polls in experimentally.
CEC said the local body polls in a district will be held in three phases and termed the move as a reform though not fundamental.
Keeping existing law in place, the EC has introduced the system, he added.
“If the election is done in three phases, there will be no need for the police to come from Dinajpur to Chattogram on the same day.
I hope this will make the election much easier. It is undeniable that there is a need to maintain law and order in elections. Replication of such model will make deployment and mobilisation of forces easier for the administration, reducing costs a lot,” he added.
Replying a query, the bureaucrat-turned election commissioner said “I have known that this time party symbol would not allocated in local body polls. It is a good decision. It is not a national election but local polls.”
When asked whether the low voter turnout in the parliamentary elections will affect the upazila elections, he said, “We have always said that the elections should be participatory…We would be very happy; Needless to say, if the elections had been more participatory, the voter turnout would undoubtedly have been higher.”