Sri Lanka’s elections will be subject to a recount as none of the candidates secured 50% of the vote, and second- and third-choice votes will now be counted.
Sri Lanka’s elections will be subject to a recount as none of the candidates obtained 50% of the votes, and second or third choice votes will now be counted, Efe reported today.
According to the Spanish news agency, which cites electoral bodies in that country, the new vote count will only take into account the second and third votes of Aruna Kumara Dissanayake, who obtained the highest number of votes, and Sajith Premadasa, who obtained the second highest number of votes.
In Sri Lanka, elections are governed by a preferential voting model, where voters can choose up to three different candidates in order of preference.
If no candidate is the first choice of more than 50% of voters, which is happening for the first time in the country’s history, Efe points out, a second recount is initiated, taking as a reference the two candidates with the greatest support and adding the votes in which they were the second or third choice.
In the first round of the electoral process, which concluded on Saturday and in which more than 17 million voters were registered, Dissanayake, candidate of the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, obtained 39.52% of the votes, according to the latest data published by the electoral authority.
Premadasa, from the opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party, won 34.28% of the vote, with the gap between the two being less than 400,000 votes.
Outgoing President Ranil Wickremesinghe was the third most voted candidate, with 17.41% of the vote, and was therefore excluded from the second count.
Dissanayake, 55, is seen as an alternative to the other two traditional candidates and is more popular among younger voters, Efe reports, explaining that this candidate is also the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a Marxist formation that led two armed uprisings against the government in the 1970s and 1980s, which caused at least 60,000 deaths.
The Marxist leader already participated in the last presidential elections in 2019, where he barely obtained 3% of the votes.
Premadasa, 57, the son of a former Sri Lankan president, came second in the last presidential election in 2019.
Although there were no serious incidents during the vote, Sri Lankan authorities declared a mandatory curfew, in force between 10:00 p.m. local time on Saturday (16:30 GMT) and 12:00 p.m. this Sunday (06:30 GMT), to prevent unrest during the counting of votes.
Source: Observadora
