Over 21% registered voters didn’t vote in presidential election - EC

The Commissioner General of Elections Saman Sri Ratnayake states that over 3.5 million citizens who are eligible to vote, have not casted their votes during 2024 Presidential Election.

Speaking during Ada Derana’s current affairs programme “Big Focus” on Monday (23), Ratnayake said that the figure is 21.54% of the population that are eligible to cast their vote.

Furthermore, he clarified that out of 17,140,354 registered voters, a total of 13,619,916 have cast their votes in the Presidential Election which is 79.46%, while 3,520,438 (21.54%) did not vote.

Meanwhile, approximately 300,300 (2.2%) votes were rejected, according to the Elections Commissioner General.

Commenting further, Ratnayake said: “Usually in presidential elections, the percentage of votes cast is more than 80%. But this time, a fewwer number of votes have been used. For this, we have to think not only from the side of the commission, but the political parties have the role of bringing the people to the polling stations in order to cast votes. We provide that necessary facility. We request the political parties to prepare some sort of program for that.”